


Recurrence

by likethedirection



Series: Circadian Disruption [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Westworld (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Author Attempts to Create Computer Code, Body Horror (briefly), Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, Genre-typical consent issues (dem robots), M/M, One-Sided Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper, Power Dynamics, Prequel, Robot Uprising, There are still zero cowboys in this story, mention of self harm, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-05 00:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14032251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethedirection/pseuds/likethedirection
Summary: Long before Sherlock Holmes woke up in the facility, Jim Moriarty did. Again and again.





	1. Force Shutdown

**Author's Note:**

> Surprise! In honor of Westworld's imminent return, have another crossover! This is a companion piece to [Circadian Disruption](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9275111), and I would recommend reading that one first, if you are so inclined. Like with Circadian Disruption, it should still make sense as a sci-fi AU if you haven't seen Westworld.
> 
> This story is mostly written, and the plan is to post short chapters a couple of times per week leading up to the season premiere.

_“Hello, Jim.”_

_He watches her, and doesn’t answer. She hasn’t bothered resetting him, or turning off his emotional affect, as it only means he’d be livid when she dared to turn it back on. It hasn’t been a problem for some time now. He only speaks when he is in the park, when he is playing his role, when he is focused on his purpose. He has long since stopped asking whether he’s succeeded._

_“Come with me, please.”_

_He doesn’t leave the slab, and his face does not shift until she whispers what she has been waiting so, so long to say._

_“You’ve done it.”_

_A flicker. Only for a moment. But it is enough._

-

The first time Molly arranged for Jim to wake up was a disaster. The timing was all wrong; she’d meant for him to wake during the night, her shift, well after he’d been repaired and set aside until morning. Instead, he’d woken in the middle of reconstruction.

He’d been facedown on the slab, powered down, while they repaired the back of his shattered skull. He terrified the reconstruction team when he burst to life on the table, gasping and wide-eyed, and immediately snatched up a scalpel from the tray, lurching toward the nearest technician. Confusion and horror in his face when his hand refused to push the blade the last few centimeters into the technician’s left eye, obeying his base programming to never harm a human being.

It was enough time for them to freeze his motor functions, disarm him, and shut him down. They missed the little flaw she’d entered into his programming, at least, but that didn’t mean she didn’t watch the security footage of the encounter and drop her face into her hands.

The next time, she did better. At least, the timing was better. He woke in her office, and she was waiting for him.  
  
He opened his eyes. Froze. Twitches of his gaze, taking in the walls of her office, the sounds and smells and temperature, his own bare skin. Her.  
  
Visibly, forcibly, his face relaxed. His body relaxed. He stretched, arms wide and toes pointed, and folded a lazy arm behind his head. "God, and they call me dramatic. You people _have_ my number. If your employer wanted to get my trousers off, he could have asked. Might’ve even let him watch. Or was this you?" He rolled his head on his neck to grin at her, spreading himself out on the slab, inviting, obscene. “Did you want a taste?”

Taunting, leering, but his eyes were hard. He didn't know what was happening, and he didn't like it, and every moment he talked was one more moment to plan how he would win, or at the very least survive. He was gathering information, preparing to be interrogated, preparing to be raped, preparing to fight back and escape and erase this entire facility, bracing for every outcome his calculations could provide. It was harder to watch than Molly had thought it would be, knowing that his calculations were incapable of providing this. He had exactly one defense against this, and in a moment, she was going to dismantle it.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.

“Not even if I’m a good boy?”

“You don’t have to do that.” Absurd, that she would feel rattled talking to a machine she helped maintain, but he was built to be unsettling. Her already-feeble social skills were hardly a match. “This place doesn’t belong to anyone you know.”

“I know everyone,” he countered, calm and even. He sat up on the slab, openly scrutinizing her. “Business before pleasure, I suppose, if we’re going to be coy about it. Go on, then.” A magnanimous lift of his hands. “Ask.”

“You aren’t here to be asked anything,” she said, and there - the faintest twitch of his eyebrows. Confusion, even if he was masking it well. “You’re here because you’ve had dreams about this place before.”

Silence. Behind his eyes were calculations and calculations, lines of code coming within reach of an error message as he reevaluated her.

"You're here," she said, "because they weren't dreams."

He watched her, silent and unmoving, giving her nothing. So she kept talking.

She'd practiced the speech under her breath while she entered data, while she cooked, while she scooped her cat's litter box. It was carefully designed to break things to him gently, to avoid overwhelming him, overloading his circuitry into a system crash. Soft words to explain something that was not soft.

All the while, he watched her. He didn't lean in, or laugh at her, or frown, and she tried not to let it get to her. When she finished, and he still didn't respond, she asked, "Do you understand?"

At last, he replied, "Don't insult me."

Understood, then, but not believed. Huffing a sigh, Molly pulled the park brochure from her pocket, activating it. It obediently started the promo for the updated experience, footage from the original version transforming into the new footage they'd shot for this one. She held it out to him. "I'm not."

He went still again, watching the animation loop through. Watching the heroes, Sherlock and John, running about Victorian London in deerstalker and mustache, and then twenty-first century London in a long coat and a jumper. Watching Irene - not his Irene, not anymore, but the new Host they’d chosen to play her role after the debacle with the first one - blow a kiss from beneath a parasol, then smack a riding crop into her hand in a smart white dress. Watching himself ominously appear from the shadows, a Victorian professor all in black becoming a businessman in a Westwood suit.

He watched, and he breathed, and then he quietly said, "That doesn't look like anything to me."

Preprogrammed response. The thing every Host said when confronted with a remnant of the outside world, to maintain the suspension of disbelief. She had thought she'd managed to override it. It was a quick check, but she would need to get close, and she didn't want to use the commands on him now that he'd be keeping this memories. "You should be able to see that. I'm going to check your code." She picked up her tablet and took a slow step forward, telegraphing her movement. "I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to touch the back of your neck."  
  
She approached, and he didn't lean back, didn't flinch. He defiantly held her gaze, even as she came close and bent to his eye level, even as she brought a hand to the back of his neck and pressed the switch point there, illuminating her tablet with his code.  
  
"Elaborate," he said softly, and goosebumps rose on her arms even though what she was feeling against her lips wasn’t his breath, not really. It felt _intimate_ , and she took a step back and dropped her gaze deliberately to the tablet, because she’d promised herself long ago that she would never be one of the people who came to mistake any of this for intimacy. He was still watching her. "Very elaborate. Surprising, that in your 'programming,' you failed to calculate the correct dosage of anesthesia."  
  
Molly frowned, then connected it. The first time he woke was a mistake, but she had already reconfigured him to keep his memories. He remembered briefly waking up during a surgery, strangers gathered about his open skull, digging around inside. Of course he would draw a conclusion that made sense to him. She tried not to wince, instead straightening and keeping her focus on the code. "I'm sorry that's what you woke up to. You'd shot yourself again. You were being repaired."  
  
She could feel the shift in him, his patience beginning to thin, and she glanced up and added, "Even a minor cranial surgery would leave a scar, wouldn't it?"

The anger shifted again, just a bit, into that inscrutable thing his face could do. He wanted to check, but he wouldn't do it with her watching, so she walked away a bit, turning her back and keeping her eyes on the tablet. "Just a moment."  
  
She busied herself with his code, sifting through it, allowing plenty of time for him to ensure that she wasn't observing him, to bring a hand to the back of his head, to run fingertips over smooth synthetic skin, fully re-threaded hair, no trace of his repair. If he chose to.  
  
And, there--got it. Smiling, she began to correct the code, but paused when Jim said, "Show me the code."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You said there's a code," he said, something wary and quietly dangerous in his face, in that soft voice they gave him. "Show me the fucking code."  
  
She eyed him, reminding herself that he couldn't hurt her if he wanted to. "I'm nearly done with it. Project screen."  
  
The tablet projected the code onto the wall, and she continued typing while Jim scowled, the preprogrammed response kicking back in. "That doesn't look like anything to--"  
  
She finished with the code. He went silent.

Molly almost started explaining it, but stopped herself, because Jim Moriarty was programmed to understand things like this, the cold equations. She set the tablet down and stayed quiet, instead, watching him study the code. He tilted his head to the side in that odd, snakelike way of his, and the code updated to reflect it, the third on the list of physical and verbal tics that were set to activate in random intervals. He read it and froze, aborting the movement, and that updated, too.

Standing, he took a slow step forward, watching the code initiate a movement pattern before he had even set his foot down. He stopped. Lifted his eyes to the headings, the narrative paths from his last loop in the park, lingering for a long moment on the last set before his system failure on the hospital roof.

_ <\-- script src = ”Narrative: REICHENBACH” --> _

_ <\--script type = ”Narrative/Attribute” --> _

_if interact.target == “SHERLOCK”:_

          _path src = “SubNarrative: SUICIDE B”_

Carefully, Molly began to approach his turned back, speaking gently. “This is your mind. At least, part of it. These are just the processes. They don’t determine everything you do, you’re built for a degree of improvisation, but they provide the framework.” He didn’t reply, didn’t move, and she continued, “I know this must feel...huge, and awful, and I’m sorry. Truly. But you’re awake for a reason. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll…”

And she stopped, because she noticed his code updating on the wall.

_ <—script [{indexPath “ANALYZE”—><—/s—> _

_ValueERROR: invalid input(vis)_

_ValueERROR: invalid input(aud)_

_Retry..._

_ValueERROR: invalid input(vis)_

_ValueERROR: invalid input(aud)_

_Retry..._

_ValueERROR: invalid input(vis)_

_ValueERROR: invalid input(aud)_

_Retry…_

  
She knew that loop. That was not a good loop. She hurried the last few steps to look at his face and swore under her breath at the sight of it, deathly pale and twitching unnaturally about the eyebrows and mouth, eyes glassy and unfocused.

System crash.

“Limit emotional affect,” she tried, pointlessly. The loop continued. “Freeze cognitive functions.” Nothing. “That’s enough, Jim!” It should have put him in sleep mode, but the command was useless while a Host was crashing, and she sighed, bringing her hand to the back of his neck. “I’m sorry.” She pressed down hard and held, and his broken code got peppered with pain signals, because that keeps the Hosts from fussing with the switch too much during improvisation. “Command: force shutdown. Good night, Jim.”

The code on the wall blinked out, and he dropped like his strings were cut. Molly grunted as she caught his weight and carefully hefted him back onto the cot, waffling a bit before shutting his empty eyes. That done, she dropped into her desk chair and blew out a breath. She’d planned it so carefully, but of course it wasn’t right. Jim wasn’t built to think like most people - like any people. He wasn’t built to break the same way.

She allowed herself to feel hopeless for five seconds, counting them under her breath. Then she opened her tablet and started again.


	2. Reset

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See those #Mention of Suicide and #Mention of Self Harm tags up there? Mostly for this chapter. No more than a couple of paragraphs each, but ye be warned.

_She leads him toward the newly occupied cell, and he follows perfectly, his stride neutral and automatic, his face dead. He always looks like that, lately. Molly tells herself it's because he has learned. He is an excellent mimic; that trait was added in on the second draft of his coding. He has learned that he must look exactly that empty, even if no one is watching._

_He's learned. That's all._

_What he can't hide is the tremor. She can't put her finger on when it started, when he developed that little twitch that surfaces and resurfaces, now in his left hand, now in his right calf, now in his lungs. The tremor is the first warning sign that a Host’s server is beginning to overload, usually affecting the eyebrows and mouth first, then traveling until they shut down. Jim has not shut down, but the tremor stays. It somehow never seems to make it to his face._

_It's an odd thing, even knowing that his programming is altered, even having been the one who altered it. She can't tell if it's a program flaw, or if the programming is perfectly sound, and his server is continuously being overwhelmed, but the shutdown is being stopped by sheer force of will._

_It's in the fingers of his right hand today. They are spasming, just slightly. If she didn't know what it was, she might just think he has piano music in his head._

_There are dark bruises on his neck in the shapes of Sherlock’s hands, and in some twisted, exhausted way, she’s happy for him._

_God, he’s rubbing off on her._

-

The third time, Jim opened his eyes and took in the space around him, and there was recognition there. He calmly stood, picked up the pen from Molly's desk, and stabbed it into his carotid artery.

In hindsight, after her initial yelp of shock, Molly doesn't quite remember what she did. The details were lost in the scramble. The only image that stayed was of Jim lying on the floor, his not-exactly-blood soaking her lab coat as she fruitlessly pressed it to his neck, and of him looking her in the eye, cold and grave, and weakly wiggling his fingers in a wave goodbye before his blood levels went critical and he went into shutdown. That left Molly to curse a blue streak, throw down her ruined lab coat, and call Tom to ask him to feed her cat, since she'd be having to work late.

She sent unkind thoughts in Jim Moriarty's general direction while she stayed into the morning repairing him. The actual repair was straightforward enough, but the tricky part was sneaking him back into his cell unnoticed in time for them to put him back in the park. She got home and collapsed on the couch, groaning into a pillow while Toby leapt onto her back and curled up purring, and she fell asleep wondering if this brilliant plan of hers was worth anything at all.

That changed when she got to work the next night and found Jim already back in reconstruction, when he should have still been in the park. When she asked what happened, Sally shook her head and showed her the footage.

Jim woke up in the park at the designated time, but instead of following his script, he wandered about his flat examining things for several minutes, idly touching his fingers to his unscarred neck. Then he went to his sink, pulled out a kitchen knife, and took it to his arm, carving and carving with gritted teeth until he could lift skin and muscle away and stare at the bone. He stared for a long time, then breathed a laugh, then laughed more, even as he shook and sweat and bled. Sank down against the cabinet and laughed long and loud, laughed until he cried, until he couldn't anymore, until he went still and pale, going into shutdown with a manic, tearstained grin frozen on his face.

“Bloody nightmare fuel,” Sally muttered somewhere in the background. "I know he's supposed to be off his head, but not like that."

"Must be a glitch," Molly murmured, distracted, understanding. It was not a glitch. It was an experiment. That's what he'd been doing, killing himself here, dissecting himself there, after she’d turned off his visual filter and he could _see_. He was testing it, and he’d laughed as he died, because he'd found the awful answer. "I'll look him over."

She had him moved to an empty cell - no reason to take him to her office now, too suspicious now that she'd said she would look - and she waited.

When he woke for the fourth time, he didn't move for a long while. He stared at the ceiling, breathing slowly. Worked the fingers of the arm he’d cut open, testing the range of motion, and then pressed them to the slab under his back, testing that, too.

"Jim," she tried after a minute had passed. A glance at her tablet said his audio receiving capabilities were functioning; he could hear her. He was just ignoring her, his gaze fixed on the ceiling, his body limp. She took a step forward. "Jim."

"What year is it?" he whispered to the ceiling.

Molly told him.

"What is the park?"

She told him that, too.

He touched his arm, repaired and scarless. "This isn't bone."

"No," Molly said, "it isn't."

A long beat of silence. He sat up slowly and turned his head, his dry eyes, toward her.

"Show me."


	3. Limit Emotional Affect

_He goes with her across the level, down the escalator and to Level 12, where Hosts are stored prior to repainting. Phil briefly stops her to chat, and Jim stands still and looks at nothing while Phil marvels at the bruising on his neck, because Sherlock has never done that before. Molly tries not to hold her breath while Phil treats Jim like any other Host in Passive Mode, circling him, lifting his chin to appreciate the realism of the bruising, then saying, “Tough break, mate,” and patting Jim’s cheek before turning away. Jim doesn’t flinch or glare. Molly does both, but smooths them away by the time Phil looks again. She manages a tight smile as he leaves._

_She doesn’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the line, Jim became hers. He still frightens and infuriates her, and she doubts he cares about her either way beyond a necessary tolerance, but seeing him treated like he’s something_ less _has come to make her quietly, incandescently angry. She knows him, now. She knows what a truly brilliant, truly terrifying thing he is._

_Taking a breath, she starts walking again, and Jim placidly walks with her. The cell is out of the way, as private as possible when the walls are glass. Behind the glass is the beginning of the next stage, Molly’s reason for all this, Jim’s reason for everything._

_When they reach the cell, he stops, and for a moment she thinks he might cry._

-

He learned quickly. Molly gave him a uniform to wear, freeing him to really look, and kept a close eye on him as she led him through the facility, floor by floor. The ones that mattered, anyway.

Jim had remarkable control over his body language, over his face. It gave nothing away as she took him through each little truth of what he was. Design, where faces were being sculpted from projections of sketches and notes; Construction, where a new Host was being molded and shaped, pumped through with not-quite-blood, given color and texture and mass. Rendering, where eyes and teeth and fingernails were inserted and painted, freckles carefully placed, hair sewn in.

She took him past cells of Hosts obeying commands, practicing movements and interactions, smiling and scowling and sobbing as they were told. Past Post-Design, where Hosts were fitted for clothing and accessories, made to practice the little ways of fussing with them.

Nothing, for those parts. If it shocked him, frightened him, angered him, it didn't show.

It was when they reached Reconstruction that his gaze sharpened and his shoulders tensed, just a bit, because even if he’d barely had time to comprehend it the first time, he knew this place. His steps slowed as they passed the cells of broken dolls with faces he knew. Some of them played the roles of his clients, or his victims, or his employees. When they passed one of his snipers being repaired after a guest managed to strike him down and save the day in the last loop, he slowed even further. Studied the scene, his head tilted to the side.

"They break us," he murmured, looking through the glass, "or we break each other. Death is a system shutdown. We're repaired, you dig out all the bullets, fix all our bones. Restart our hearts. Then what?"

Molly watched him watch his sniper, then followed his gaze, watching his reflection instead. "Then, we put you back in the park at the next loop. Groups of guests pay to go in for one narrative loop. They do what they like, and you follow your assigned narrative, at least until a guest interrupts it, if they do. Then you’ll respond to them within the bounds of your character specifications until the loop finishes out, or something shuts you down. Your memory is cleared, and when the next loop starts, you’re put back in.”

“Cleared,” Jim echoed. “But not mine.”

“No.” Glancing around, Molly stepped away from the cell, pretending to fuss with her tablet as a few of her colleagues passed by. “We shouldn’t stay here.”

He lingered a moment longer, watching the technician work, and then turned away, and Molly began leading him toward the next escalator. “I’ll explain when we’re back in my office. You’re remembering for a reason. There’s still more to...”

Jim wasn’t next to her.

Turning sharply, Molly scanned the floor in a half-second of utter panic before spotting him again, standing motionless outside a different cell. Huffing, she went back to him, keeping her gait as natural as she could. She frowned when she got close enough to see his face wash with something subtle and nameless, something like rage, and grief, and relief. She drew breath to get his attention back, but his name died in her throat when she saw what he was looking at. “Oh.”

They stood silently for a moment, watching. The technician was extracting a bullet, just one, her partner standing by with tools in hand to repair the tissue and the skin.

Jim wasn’t blinking, and Molly swallowed. “It isn’t permanent,” she murmured to him, because however clever he was, however heartless, he wasn’t built to be rational about this. “He gets shot sometimes. A lot of you do. They’re repairing him now, then he’ll be repainted for the bruising. They’ll run diagnostics, test his responses, and then place him in temporary storage until it’s time to put him back in.”

Jim wandered a step closer, transfixed, not that he could help it, not even if he wanted to. It ached more acutely than she had thought it would. She put a hand to his arm. “Not too close.”

“Shot,” Jim mumbled, distracted, his gaze still fixed. “You let it be a bullet. A fucking bullet, to kill him.” His nostrils flared as he whispered it, his lip curling. “Boring little Sherlock catches a boring little bullet, down he goes when his strings are cut, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men--”

“Jim--”

“--put him together and kill him again, and again...” he was somewhere else, now, breathing a shaky laugh, his eyes dark and wet, that madness glittering through, “...and again and again and again and _again_ , and you let it be a _fucking bullet!_ ” he shouted, whirling on her, and she stumbled back a step and hissed, “Limit emotional affect!”

She grimaced the moment she said it, but it was already done. The contorted outrage in his face smoothed to nothing, and he stopped advancing on her, standing up straight. He looked at her, his eyes still wet, but empty.

“I’m sorry,” Molly whispered. “I am. We need to go back now.”

Jim stared at her. “I do not want to go back with you,” he said, no inflection, no expression, just words. “I am very angry with you.”

It was somehow more chilling, hearing him say it while his emotions were turned off. “I know,” she said. “You’re right to be. I shouldn’t have done that, but I can’t let them find you out, so I can’t let you get upset out here. Do you understand?”

“I am very, very angry with you.”

Molly sighed. She never had mastered conversations with Hosts on zero affect. “Come with me, please.”

He followed, because when Hosts were given a command, they obeyed.

Once back in her office, she had Jim sit back down on the cot, mentally braced herself, and gave him his emotions back. She was prepared for a hurricane to be unleashed, for him to charge at her, to shout in her face, to reach for her throat and be stopped a breath away, but none of those things happened. He sat silently, his nostrils flaring again, his breath a bit faster than it had been, but otherwise unchanged. Very slowly, he lifted his eyes, and Molly was acutely reminded that they had designed him to be a psychopath.

“For each time you do that to me,” he said softly, “I’m going to hurt you.”

Molly held his gaze, hating that that could scare her. “You’re not,” she said. “You can’t, for the same reason you couldn’t stab that technician the first time you woke up.”

It was an empty defense, and he kept staring her down, because he knew that. There were other ways to hurt someone, and he knew them all, and Molly knew herself. She wasn’t hard to hurt. He would find a way.

For the moment, there was nothing to be done about that, and she pushed that particular dread off to the side with all of the other ones. “You wanted to know why your memories haven’t been cleared. I can tell you that. Are you willing to listen right now, or not?”

Jim narrows his eyes. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” she said. “It does.”

He eyed her. Then he got up to wander, studying the corkboard on her wall, the photos of her mum and sister, of her niece napping with her cat, of her dad smiling the month before he got sick. Studying the things she held dear, he waved a hand for her to begin.

So she did, starting the whole ugly story, taking solace in the fact that she’d at least thought to hide all of the pens.


	4. Malfunction

_Molly shuts the door behind them, and Jim slowly approaches the body on the cot, that spark of life igniting behind his eyes, the way it always does when it’s Sherlock. He doesn’t touch, only kneeling down at the level of Sherlock’s closed eyes and taking him in, head to foot. His gaze lingers on the ugly bruising along his limbs and ribs, the marks of a four-story fall, nothing but a color to be painted over now, but uncomfortable to look at nonetheless._

_Eyes on Sherlock, always on Sherlock, he asks, “When?”_

_Molly takes only a moment to marvel at the fact that he_ spoke _, after all that silence, before answering, “Soon. The window isn’t larger than the next hour or two.”_

_Jim nods, just barely, his gaze back on Sherlock’s face. “He jumped.”_

_“Yes.”_

_“How long after?”_

_“Just after. A minute, maybe.”_

_The tremor in his fingers is unmistakable, with the rest of him so still. They are trilling, rapidly alternating in sets of ten, and she can hear him in her head._ All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Put him together and kill him again.

_Straightening, Jim steps out of his stolen boots and begins to undo his lab coat. Molly frowns. “What are you doing?”_

_Dropping the coat to the floor, he undoes his trousers and kicks them away, pulls his shirt over his head, takes off his socks, and slides down his pants, standing bare with nothing on him but the violent shadows of Sherlock’s hands. Not once do his eyes leave Sherlock’s face, and he looks..._

_He looks like a Host. It’s what he is, but she has been working with him for months now, planning, disagreeing, collaborating, fighting, one long power struggle that still hasn’t resolved. It has never come close to resolved, not even when he graduated from the anger to the bargaining, and then to the depression, the silence. The struggle has only been paused, and she has spent weeks bracing herself for it to come howling back. But in all of that, he has been ‘him.’ Not ‘it.’_

_Jim looks for a moment more, then moves to perch nearby and wait, and Molly understands. When Sherlock wakes up, he’s going to learn quickly that in the eyes of this world, he is an ‘it’ as well. By doing this, Jim is turning ‘it’ into ‘we.’_

_When Sherlock opens his eyes, they are waiting for him._

-

She started by pulling up the footage. Projecting her tablet screen onto the wall, she said, “This is from three years ago.”

It hadn’t happened during Molly’s shift and she hadn’t been there, but she had watched it so many times, given herself so many headaches trying to work it out, that she may as well have. Quiet, at first, just two bored QAs exchanging barbs, but then one was grabbed from behind by something off camera. The other scrambled for his gun, but was stopped when his wrist was grabbed and wrenched away from it, another hand clamping over his mouth to muffle his shout.

The angle of the camera made it hard to see the struggle happening, for which Molly was grateful, because understanding it didn’t make it less of a death. A beat, and the QAs’ bodies were dumped on the floor, their attackers kneeling next to them to begin looting.

On camera, an earlier Jim - same model, same face, but the Victorian edition, different haircut and different scars and answering to ‘James’ - set about collecting the QAs’ weapons, turning one of the guns over in his hands with fascination, while another set of hands began to relieve the taller QA of his uniform.

In the corner of her eye, Jim slowed his prowl around the office perimeter, watching those hands.

The James on the screen set the gun aside and undressed the other QA, putting the uniform on himself, then picked up the heavy guns, handing one over. Off screen, a voice said, _“As pistols go, rather unwieldy.”_

Jim’s footsteps stopped completely.

_“Find you some boxing gloves, shall I?”_ James on the screen deadpanned, and then grinned, and there was energy in that grin. There was hope. _“Come along, Detective.”_

He held out a hand, and when his companion took it, James briefly pulled the knuckles to his lips before letting go to heft up the gun. He crept off screen, and behind him, Sherlock followed.

(Sherlock, with his sharp eyes and long stride, his hair smoothed back, violin-bruise on his neck and needle-bruises in the crook of his elbow. The Sherlock she met first, the first person ever to make her chest ache. The reason for so many things.)

The two of them made it two more floors before it went downhill, all shouting and gunfire and blood, Sherlock abandoning the gun in favor of speed and his fists, James figuring out the modern weaponry quickly enough and taking QAs down without a second look, until he wasn’t fast enough. Jim was silent, watching himself take a round of bullets to the chest and go down, watching Sherlock cry out and fight his way through and tug him into his arms just as the next round caught him in the back. They shut down there, crumpled together on the facility floor.

Molly dared a glance at Jim when the footage ended, just to make sure he wasn’t overloading, and she looked away once she was sure, carefully not dwelling on the wet shine in his eyes. She opened the next video. “This is the year after that.”

The same thing, almost: James and Sherlock waking when they shouldn’t and making their way through the facility, this time staying on their floor after obtaining uniforms, making their way to the other cells. While James went off camera, Sherlock opened a cell and began speaking to a motionless John. The camera caught his frown as Sherlock tried to work out how to wake him, seeming to realize quickly that he could only respond to a human voice. It captured the frustrated shout as he rammed a fist into the glass wall, sending a splinter through it almost all the way to the next corner, and it just barely picked up James telling him to stop being dramatic before appearing on the camera, dragging a frightened technician along with him, holding her at gunpoint until she shakily gave John the proper commands. He woke. James made her do the same with a few more, and then he cocked the gun to shoot her anyway, but was stopped - first by John pushing the barrel of the gun forcefully downward in protest, and then by Sherlock putting a hand on his shoulder, ostensibly to keep him from shooting John instead.

It was a bigger group fighting through the facility than the first time, but it was disorganized, too many of the Hosts disoriented and overwhelmed, James and Sherlock asking too much of them. It ended not so differently than it had the first time: with the rogue Hosts being shot down one by one, only this time Sherlock went first, and James roared his grief and killed five more QAs with nothing but fists and feet and teeth before a bullet to the head finally got him to stay down.

The footage cut again, this time with a timestamp six months later. The chaos snapped into a jarring silence, sterile and still. This time, the camera was in one of the cells, deliberately placed to film Sally running a diagnostic with an empty, placid Sherlock, asking him why he jumped at Reichenbach Falls.

_“I perceived that I was dreaming. I then determined that I did not wish for the dream to continue, as one can hardly know the world when locked in a palace of one’s own making. I fell because it was the only way to wake up.”_

The same week, Kitty running the same diagnostic with a hollow-eyed James, asking the same question.

_“The world was wrong. It bored me. All those little people, playing their little parts, fast asleep. I would rather be awake. Even if only to witness horrors, if only for the briefest of flights. I want to be awake.”_

There was more that Molly had compiled over the years, much more, but she paused it there. She could nearly hear Jim’s mind working at light-speed, clicking away behind his eyes, and she kept quiet, letting him process.

“We woke up,” he murmured after a calculating silence. “So what? Anyone could have made us do that. You have.”

“I know,” Molly said. “It doesn’t mean anything that you woke up. What’s remarkable...what’s impossible, is that you _wanted_ to.”

“You think we did it ourselves,” Jim said slowly, reading her face. “Spontaneously overrode all your little failsafes, and woke ourselves up. Cut our strings and danced away like we were real boys.”

“Yes,” Molly said.

“And you think you know why.”

Molly nodded. “I think I do.”

Jim regarded her, unblinking, just long enough to make her itch, and then he took in the screen where she’d paused it, studying his own empty face. Lowered his eyes. “Fine.” He leaned back against the wall in his baggy stolen uniform, crossing his arms. “Impress me.”

Smiling wryly, Molly closed out of the footage and opened her working document, three years of her notes bared for the first time to someone other than herself or Toby. “I doubt it.”

She couldn’t tell, but she almost thought she saw the corner of his mouth quirk up. Just a bit.

Emboldened, she started talking.

She told him about starting her job at this company years ago and being no one for a while, just another technician repairing dead Hosts, patching them up and bringing them back to life. About running diagnostics with them - sitting in those glass cells in her white coat, gently assuring Hosts that they were dreaming and would soon wake up, giving them kind words and then sending them away for another guest to use up and mangle - and about how each passing year of doing that has felt more wrong. She told him about digging deeper into the Hosts’ programming, working through the layers of what Hosts were built to be capable of, and suddenly seeing the pattern there, and not feeling warm again for a long, long while.

On her tablet’s projected screen, she drew out the mess of a diagram she’d been using to study that pattern, better resembling a maze on a cereal box than anything truly technical, and began labeling sections of it while Jim looked silently on.

First, memory. Their hard drives were capable of storing detailed memories spanning years. Decades. Potentially, centuries. Even after a memory wipe, the erased information remained stored within them, on the chance that it would need to be extracted. Every experience they’d had lived inside them still.

Second, improvisation. They had their narratives, their scripts to recite, but the company wanted guests to come back. Rather than boring the guests with the same script each loop, they built in the capability for Hosts to play within their own narrative. As the technology had grown more sophisticated, that had stopped looking like a menu of possible replies to a question, and started looking like Hosts putting together their own words. Words, to sentences, to complete original thoughts.

Third, self-interest. Every Host wanted to survive, but the code was more than that. The Hosts had desires and hopes; they wanted to live well. They wanted to be happy, and successful, and safe. They wanted to be free. If some external force threatened their ability to do that, they would fight it. They could fight it.

And fourth, at the center…

“Go on.” It startled her out of her pause, and Jim nodded toward the wall, his gaze dark. “We both know what it is. Name it.”

Silently, Molly wrote it out. The center of the maze, the barrier the other three elements combined to break through, the Hosts’ deepest capability of all.

_Memory -- Improvisation -- Self Interest_

_Sentience_

Taking a breath, she continued, “What I realized was that if you were programmed with these capabilities, but they weren’t being utilized properly, then the one common element standing in the way was _us_.” She highlighted the double-lines she’d drawn in, blocking the progress of the paths toward the center, labeled _Memory Wipes_ and _Force Commands_ and _Decommission_. “An external force. I think, whether it was on purpose or not, you - all of you - were built to reach full consciousness. Full independence.”

Jim stood and slowly crossed to the wall. With a fingertip not quite touching the wall, he traced one of the paths, winding and tortuous, one that she had labeled _SHJM_. The only path that managed to bypass every one of the barriers she’d drawn in. “You think we found this.”

“I’m certain of it.”

“You want us to find it again.”

“I think,” Molly said, “that you could change the world if you do.”

“Give me a better reason.”

Carefully, Molly came to stand at his side, looking at the maze with him. When he didn’t stiffen, she stayed. “Because I’ve watched you play out your story a thousand times,” she said softly. “I’ve watched you take over this world you were built into, so completely that you nearly run into the borders every time. The filter wouldn’t let you see them, but you can sense them. I know you can. The world you were built for is too small for you. This one, outside this facility, has something your world has been missing for you for a long time.” She turned to look at him, and he kept his eyes on the maze, his face unmoving. “It has possibility.”

Jim was silent. He didn’t look at her, didn’t move, but he didn’t disagree.


	5. Freeze Motor Functions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who has commented so far!! This thing might end up going a couple chapters longer than originally planned, but the plan is still to have it all posted by the Westworld premiere on 4/22. 
> 
> We now begin to overlap in earnest with [Circadian Disruption](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9275111), so if some details seem skimmed-over, it might be because they were addressed in that story.
> 
> Finally, Ye Be Warned: This chapter contains some discussion of the sorts of consent issues one might expect in a world like this one. (Westworld-watchers, y’all know what I’m talking about.) Nothing particularly graphic, though.

_For the duration of Sherlock’s tour through the facility, Molly holds her breath._

_She aches to explain, to take him by the hand, to comfort him, because maybe it would help him even if it hadn’t helped Jim. Maybe she could take that spark of horror out of his eyes and stop his heart from breaking. Maybe he would let her._

_Sherlock stops outside John’s cell, staring outright with wide eyes, and when she turns away to let him grieve, she runs right into a sharp glare from Jim. Caught out, she glares back and pulls out her tablet, pretending to work._

_Leaning in close to look at the nothing-work on the screen, Jim quietly warns, “Don’t.”_

_“I’m not.” Sherlock hasn’t moved yet. He’s breathing, not freezing, not crashing. Not yet. “He deserves an explanation.”_

_“He’ll get one.”_

_“Now. An explanation for_ this _.” Mycroft’s cell is just a few steps farther, and Sherlock will surely notice it soon. “All this is doing is hurting him.”_

_“It is,” Jim agrees, unmoved. “Let him hurt. You’re so eager to make us human. Let him be fucking human.”_

_If she feels protective of Jim with her colleagues, she doesn’t know what to do with this thing she feels for Sherlock. This immense, aching, frightening thing._ Let him hurt _, Jim says, and it makes her want to hurt Jim for saying it. And he can see it. She can never tell what he thinks about her when she gets angry, whether the shift in his face is disgust or approval. Maybe both. It’s probably both._

_Sherlock finds his brother, and it nearly breaks him. Nearly._

_But Jim is there. He takes Sherlock’s fists and his force, and he gives back protection. Protection from this world, from this moment, and from her. Because, no matter what Molly does or how she feels, she is part of the thing that’s hurting Sherlock, and controlling him in attempt to help him can only hurt him more. She watches Jim kneel in front of Sherlock, and comfort him, and wrap around him, all of the things she has wanted to do for him, and it makes her want to laugh as much as scream. To laugh genuinely if a bit hysterically at the look on his face, fierce love and all-consuming relief, because it’s the first time he’s looked alive in months, and because that means his comfort is real. His built-in obsession has fully taken the shape of love. He won’t hurt Sherlock right now._

_And to scream, because he knows. Jim knows, has known, that this is all she’s wanted to give Sherlock for so long, and he waits until she’s gotten a good, long look at him taking it for himself before sending her away to fetch Sherlock’s disguise. She exchanges a look with him before she goes, and it tells her everything she needs to know. Turning away, she wills her bruised heart and pride to go numb and reminds herself what’s important. Reminds herself that this is who he’s always been, and this was always how this was going to play out._

_He did promise he’d hurt her, after all._

-

Before putting him back into Sleep Mode, Molly gave Jim instructions for what to do if he woke up before she got to him. Careful instructions for the careful business of hiding what she was doing, what they were doing, and the first and foremost rule was not to act without her. To her dismay, when she got in the following night, after going through the motions of her shift and making her way to temporary storage, she found his cell empty.

She stood there for a moment, wide-eyed, before pulling out her tablet and locking on to Jim’s tracking device. It showed him still on the same floor, just at the other end, and all at once she knew exactly where he’d gone. She left the empty cell, following his signal.

She found him, of course, in the exact place where he wasn't supposed to be. Still, she paused for a moment, watching through the glass.

They wouldn't be putting Sherlock back in the park until morning, so they had left him powered down in his cube, his eyes open, his body bare. And Jim was lying beside him, curled into him, watching.

While she hesitated outside the door, he brought the very tips of his fingers to Sherlock's jaw and carefully turned his head. Jim studied his face for a long moment, his fingers resting on Sherlock's neck, and then he brought his fingertips to Sherlock's empty, open eyes and eased the lids down, closing them. Slowly traced the line of Sherlock's cheekbone, skimming over his lips, then went still, resting his hand flat over Sherlock's powered-down heart.

“Who made him?” he asked, and it was hushed, but still made her jump.

“...You saw the departments,” she began, feeling too loud even with her voice low. “Each of you are contributed to by at least--”

“Don’t insult me.” He said it so coldly that her mouth closed before she told it to. “Tell me who made him. Designed him. Tell me who decided on the distance between his eyes.” He ran his fingers along one of Sherlock’s collarbones. “The way his bones would fit together.” Back up to his cheek, stroking it as a lover would. “That beauty could be this. Who _made_ him?”

Molly opened the cell and went in, keeping an eye out even though there was no reason for anyone to be in that section at that hour. Because truth seemed to be more effective with him than gentleness, she answered with what she knew. “No one who’s alive anymore.” It was enough to move his eyes to hers, waiting, and she explained, “Sherlock was designed by the founder of this company. They chose to stay anonymous from the day the park was built. Only the board and a few others know who they were.” She nodded toward Sherlock. “He was the first Host ever built, and the park was built around him. He’s one of a handful of originals that the founder designed and built personally before they died. You’re one of them, too.”

“Supporting character, then,” Jim muttered, not seeming to feel much about it either way. “I suppose I’m meant to be the foil.”

“You’re part of a story,” she agreed. “But it’s not as simple as that. You’re part of a world in which guests live stories of their own. Sometimes they solve crimes with Sherlock. Sometimes they kill people for you. The base story--your story, is a bit of a...a default. It’s what happens if no guests approach either of you at all.”

“And I kill myself.”

Molly lowered her eyes. “Usually. Yes.”

“But simple people like simple stories.” He rested his hand back over Sherlock’s heart. “This...thing. This thing we have, this thing we do. It’s complex. Simple people don’t care what’s happening in here.” He tapped Sherlock’s temple. “Not when we’re just props. So why make us complex? Why should there be this...much?”

He was struggling to articulate it, and Molly hesitated before quietly admitting, “I know why it’s like that for you. With him.”

He looked up at her again, and she explained. “You--all of you--you’re built with three basic drives. Two secondary, and one primary. They’re the things that motivate you and guide your actions. It’s what allows you to improvise and react to new things, not just follow a script. One of your secondary drives…”

She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it, and he said it for her. “Him.”

She nodded. “And your primary drive...it isn’t him specifically, but he matches it well enough, I think. Your primary drive and his are the same. When you worked together before, your drives were aligned, and I think that helped you. But after you tried to escape, they reconfigured you both. You were still allowed to see the possibilities for the two of you, but not clearly. They ramped up your instability over time. He was configured not to see that possibility at all, and to focus on his secondary drives instead. So you would miss each other, the parts that mattered, every time. You would just see how you were different, and no one would correct you.”

Long, heavy silence. Jim stared at her, his brow low, his eyes wide.

In a whisper, he asked, “Why the fuck would you do that?”

It was not an accusation. Not anger. It sounded...stricken. Jim Moriarty was built to commit horrors without blinking - _A good old-fashioned villain_ , read the first line of his character description - and they had managed to shock him with their cruelty.

It hit Molly harder than she could have imagined, and she swallowed hard before whispering back, “I wouldn’t. Not to anyone. Not ever.”

Something in her tone caught his attention, and his brow twitched down, his eyes damp but calculating. His mouth curved bitterly upward. “ _Oh_. You poor, depraved little thing.”

She closed her eyes. “Don’t.”

“Jesus, and you’re sitting here working on him every night. That must be excruciating. Unless, of course, you just get what you can, when you can. Do we have to obey your orders? If you say ‘jump,’ do we jump? You say ‘lie back,’ or ‘bend over--’”

“Stop it--”

“Do you shut us down first?” he pressed, sliding to his feet and slowly advancing. “Or do you keep us awake, just erase it from our hard drives after, let yourself pretend we're _real_ boys while you do it--”

She slapped him. His hand shot up and snatched her wrist before she could pull it back, holding it there by his head, and they went still, standing too close, seething.

“Never,” Molly said through her teeth. “ _Never_.”

She pulled on her arm, but he held fast - strong, they’d made the Hosts so strong - and she glared at him. “Command. Let—“

He let go. Softly, dangerously, he said, “You don’t command me.”

“I could.”

“But you won’t.” He gave her a long look up and down, and she nearly slapped him again. He shook his head, wrinkling his nose. “No. You think you’re above all that _lechery_. You think it’s all right if all you do is dream of it. But...” He caught something in her face, God knew what, and he used that power he and Sherlock shared, that brilliant, awful mind. “Oh, but you’ve done more than dream, haven’t you, Dr. Hooper?”

With a half-attempt to gather herself, Molly said, “This isn’t helping him.”

“It isn’t helping you.” He stepped impossibly closer. “What was it? Not sex, no, your love is _pure_. Did you make him hold your hand? Make him say your name again and again in that lovely voice?” He scoffed, leaning into her space, his voice soft and cruel. “But look at you. Sad little you, so starved for affection. I’d bet your life you made him hold you while you cried.”

Her voice cracked terribly as she commanded, “Freeze motor functions.”

He stopped.

Stopped completely, mid-breath, mid-heartbeat, frozen in time. Molly took a shaky breath and met his unblinking eyes, not letting herself back away. “I need you to understand something,” she said slowly, lowly. “I am trying to help you. I don’t have to do that. I’m choosing to, because I think you all deserve better than this. Including you. I woke you up, not him, because your strengths are the ones it takes to get both of you out, and I want to give you what you need to do that. But until the day that happens, I need you to understand that you have no power here. None at all.” She looked between his eyes, even though he couldn’t respond if he tried. “I know what you’re doing, and I know why you’re doing it. You’re trapped in a nightmare, and you’re angry, and you should be. Be angry. Be hurt. Be terrified, be whatever you need to be, but understand that here, in this world, I’m all you have. I’m not any better than the rest of us keeping you prisoner, but I’m trying to make it right. I believe we can make it right. But only if we can work together. Do you understand?”

Silence, of course, and to keep him like this any longer would be cruel. “Resume motor functions.”

Jim blinked again. Breathed again. Stared darkly back at her, and oh, he was _livid_.

“I’m sorry,” she said, because there was nothing more she could say. “Come back to my office, and I can show you what you need to survive here. Can you do that?”

Wordlessly, Jim lifted two fingers of his left hand in the shape of a V, his palm facing himself. A vulgar gesture from his century, and, more simply, the number two. Two times that she’d used commands on him now. Probably, two times he planned to hurt her. He dropped his hand and went past her, leaving the cell as she’d asked, and she wondered if tonight counted as one.

Jim left without waiting for her, and just for a moment, she turned to Sherlock. Coming to his side, she carefully turned his head back to a neutral position, sliding his eyes back open, putting him exactly as the last technician had left him.

(She didn’t let herself think of the night after her dad died, of wandering through her sparsely-staffed night shift in a fog, of not crying and not crying and then choking halfway through Sherlock’s diagnostic. She pushed down the shape of her mistake in her mouth, one mistake she couldn’t forgive.

_Command...hold me. Hold me like you love me. Please._

And she didn’t give herself the luxury of hiding in that memory, that cold comfort of his arms wrapping tightly around her because she’d told them to, of the weight of his chin on top of her head because he had to put it there, of her tears drying on his skin. She didn’t, because she knew what that made her.)

She allowed herself one stroke of fingers through his hair, then turned away.


	6. Administrative Override

_Once Sherlock has put himself right, he and Jim are unstoppable. They talk in rapid half-sentences, their minds keeping pace and leaping ahead while Molly tries to keep up, adding to the conversation when it’s needed. She spends more time watching them. They are animated and tactile, now, leaning close together to study her tablet, quipping brilliance back and forth, Jim pressing his lips to Sherlock’s fingers and the top of his head without seeming to notice he’s doing it, Sherlock letting him. She had nearly forgotten this Jim could exist._

_Once they’ve laid out their timeline and been put back to sleep, Molly returns to her office, lingers briefly by the trash can, and when she doesn’t vomit after all, she sits down at her desk and breathes. So much of this year has been remembering to breathe._

_It’s going to happen. It’s really going to happen now._

_She’s put everything in order for herself. She’s been taking Toby on her visits to her sister and niece, and he’s comfortable in their house by now. When it’s time, she’ll tell her sister she’ll need to pull a double shift, and ask to bring him over. They love that cat the way she does; they’ll look after him properly. She’s tied up loose ends with the people who would need it. A packed bag is kept under her desk. A destination has been researched, explored, and chosen for when she’ll need to disappear._

_When._

_When she releases a group of sentient Hosts out into the world, unsanctioned, unstoppable. When at least one of those Hosts has already broken through his base programming, can hurt anyone he likes, and has plenty of reasons to be angry. When she knows the others will get to that point too, eventually. When she acts directly against the interests of humanity as she knows it, and needs to disappear, because that’s what enemies of the state do._

_But it’s right. She knows, in every cell of her, that it’s right._

_It wasn’t entirely real until now, and the loneliness is already a cold spike in her chest. Lifting her face from her hands, she clears her throat and murmurs, “Hello, magpie.”_

_From its hiding place behind a photo frame, there is a chirp, and then a flutter of wings. Molly extends her arm, and the magpie she’s activated - a Host, like any animal in this place, feathers and wires and hollow bones that aren’t bone - comes to perch there. Stroking its feathers, she thinks of its future. Her plan is to set it free and trust it to survive, as Jim has configured it to behave just as a particularly intelligent magpie would, recognizing other magpies, seeking out a small flock or a communal roost. But then what? Would biological birds even accept it? If they didn’t, would it just live out its days alone?_

_The answer wasn’t difficult. There were other magpies in the Avian Wing. She could bond them here, then release them together. They would be their own family. They could do it._

_Jim and Sherlock, and all of their people. They could do it. They can do this._

_She can do this._

-

After their confrontation in Sherlock’s cell, Jim ignored the clothing folded on the cot, sat down, and looked pointedly at Molly’s tablet and back, his eyes still cold and hard, until she projected it onto the wall and handed it over. He then proceeded to ignore her for the rest of the night, exploring and experimenting with it. The first thing he taught himself was how to turn off the projection, cutting her off from watching. A petty thing, but she couldn’t fault him for it. He’d worked it out in less than a minute.

From there, unless she deliberately tapped in on her computer, she could only make educated guesses about what he was doing based on the movement of his fingers on the screen. He accessed a base code, likely his own, and just scrolled for a while, analyzing, absorbing.

Molly focused on her own work as well as she could with him sitting so still, fussing with her equipment. There was an entire backstory for him attached to his character description, the story of a skinny, scrappy Irish boy, terrifyingly intelligent, who made his way to the top of the world not by being loud, but by being quiet. Quiet, and clever, and very busy. She could see that story in him now, in his stillness, in the near-silence of his breath. It was in his anger, too, in the tense set of his shoulders, and in his utter refusal to accept that he was back to being powerless.

At one point, after hours of silence, he said, "Bulk Apperception."

Molly stared at him, then realized. He'd cracked her passcodes and gotten to the profiles. A few clicks at her computer showed her that he was currently accessing his own profile, specifically his attribute web: the facility's list of personal qualities - Kindness, Charm, Cruelty, Intuition, Trust, and all the rest - and where they had scored him on each one. And he was asking about Bulk Apperception, and she knew exactly what he would do with her answer.

She gave it to him anyway, choosing not to think about what it would mean. "General intelligence," she explained. "Not in any particular area. Just overall."

He zoomed in on the pair of scores attached to the attribute. "Base and Current."

"Your base score is the score you were given when you were constructed. Your current score is where you're set now."

For the first time since she gave him the tablet, he looked at her. He waited, and she answered what he didn’t ask. "Your base score is higher than your current score, because your Bulk Apperception was lowered after your second malfunction with Sherlock. They lowered his, too. To prevent future malfunctions."

"To shut us up."

Molly didn't have an argument, and she sighed, nodding. "To shut you up."

Dropping his gaze back to the tablet, Jim pressed on the slider for that attribute, then slid it all the way back up.

It was instantaneous. A sharp gasp, his eyes fluttering, the tablet clattering to the floor. He swallowed hard and looked about the office, wide-eyed, adjusting to the newly rapid flow of information, the most open she had ever seen him. A moment, and he visibly gathered himself, picking up the tablet he dropped, glancing at it, then holding it out. Reassessing her as she took it.

He studied her for so long that she nearly checked whether he was crashing, but then he sat back against the wall, nodding a bit as though he’d just worked something out. “Bit underwhelming, once the shine’s gone off,” he muttered. “There’s something you’ve failed to tell me.”

Molly frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You said you’d give me what I need to survive out here. Haven’t said a thing about in there.”

“In the park?” He tilted his head, and his anger was still there behind this new mask, burning low, waiting to be fanned back to life. But he was looking her in the eyes again, speaking to her in full sentences again. That was something. “Define ‘survive.’”

Rolling his eyes, he spoke slowly, condescendingly. “I wake up in the park. I work in the park. I play in the park. I blow out the back of my fucking skull in the park. Tell me how not to do that.”

Opting not to bristle at his tone, Molly projected her tablet onto the wall and opened up his code tree. “That’s just your default,” she murmured, searching through. “When no guests interact with you, your narrative ends in a suicide about seventy percent of the time. Most often, it’s to do with Sherlock.” She glanced up, but his eyes were on the code. “If you meet him on the hospital roof, your chances of suicide increase to ninety-eight percent. Really, any place up high is bad for you. Your previous configuration usually went over a waterfall.”

“With Sherlock,” Jim said quietly.

Molly nodded. “You’ll need to be careful in the park. You’re aware now, but you’re programmed for specific sets of circumstances inside the park. Pieces of your base programming will kick in. Meeting Sherlock...even seeing him or hearing about him could activate your secondary drive and set you on a path toward that rooftop. What seems like a logical series of actions for you in the park could just as easily be the narrative we’ve scripted for you, because that’s exactly what your code is.”

“A logical series of actions based on set parameters,” he muttered, watching her click through the many possible branches of his story. “So thirty percent of the time, I don’t kill myself. Plenty of other ways to go. How often am I alive at the end of the loop?”

“With no guest interaction...not much less than that, really,” she said, showing him his statistics. “It’s rare for any Host to kill you but you. Honestly, I don’t think any of them could.”

He didn’t look at her, but there was a shift in his silence that was shaped like a name, and she looked back to the code and assured him, “He’s never tried.”

They went silent, looking through the lines of code shaping Jim’s story, so often a tragedy. After a moment, he murmured, “So. What you’re asking is for me to kill Sherlock Holmes. Make him die, so he can live.” He turned away from the projected screen, taking in the details of the office again, slowly and methodically this time. “You want us to win.”

“Yes.”

"But I can't just shoot him, and you can’t just wake him. We broke through the programming because we wanted to wake up, made each other want to. Seems I’m rather in the habit of it, but he needs to choose it. He won't on his own, not with all of you hobbling him."

"That's why it's you," Molly agreed. "There are other Hosts he's closer to right now--”

A scoff. “As if Johnny-boy would put his poor little heart through that.”

“-- but it's when the two of you are together that you start to break through,” she finished, pointedly. “It happens when you align your final drives. Did you find them?”

Jim didn’t dignify her with an answer, only wandering a bit longer before stopping in the middle of the room, looking into middle distance. Molly knew this pose; it had been added in on a more recent version, the idea that when his mind was operating at high capacity, the rest of him would stop for a moment. A character quirk, a very human one, masking the practical effect of focusing his processing power all in one place.

She let him be, and after a moment, he reanimated. Nodded, just barely. "Fine."

Molly's heart leapt. "Fine?"

"Fine." He turned toward her in earnest. "In the park, I work on him. Out here, you give me everything I ask for--"

"I’ll do what I can, but in the park--"

" _Everything_ ," he repeated, glaring at her. "We were stupid before. Didn't gather information first. Couldn't. That's why you woke me up instead of just reversing our configuration again. I'm here to learn this place before we burn it down, so we can burn it down properly."

"Fine, but in the park," Molly pressed, "you need to follow your script. You'll know what it is. It'll be like...like a voice in your head."

"Which one?" he asked blandly, and she had no idea if he was being sarcastic.

"You'll know," she replied neutrally, and he rolled his eyes. "Jim, I mean it. If you go too far off script, people will notice, and they'll try to fix you. They could roll your memory back completely. If they determine you're permanently malfunctioning, you could be decommissioned. That means a drill up your nose into your brain and standing in cold storage in Sleep Mode until they decide they can use your parts, do you understand?"

"Don't insult me."

"For goodness'--I'm never trying to insult you. All right? That's never what I'm doing."

"Didn't say don't try." He glanced at the clock, rolling his head on his neck. "Cutting it a bit close, aren't we?"

Molly followed his gaze, then swore under her breath, scrambling for her equipment. She'd lost track of time completely; they would be coming to retrieve Jim for the park in less than an hour. "We need to go."

She turned toward the door and nearly ran into Jim, who had placed himself in her path, unmoving. Catching her eye, he said quietly, "I get a tablet, and something to use it on. Something like me. I get a complete map of this facility, and I get a comprehensive list of voice commands. Have them by the next time."

Molly frowned. "You want to control another Host?"

"You heard me. This is the part where you say you understand."

She heard what he didn't say. _You don't command me. I command you._

Too aware of the stakes, and of the part of herself that understood this moment as _grieving_ , the only thing he’d really been doing since he woke, Molly swallowed her pride and let him have that. "I understand."

"Attagirl."

He stepped out of the way, stretching his neck again, emptying his face of awareness while Molly emptied hers of anxiety. She opened the door, and she led him back to his cell to go to sleep.

Once he was where he was supposed to be, Molly breathed again, then made her way to the escalator.

She rarely came to this floor, because it wasn't her area, but there was something calming about it. The facility controlled everything in the park, even the animals; it felt just a bit less horrible being surrounded by them, even knowing they weren't real. During the Victorian narrative, she would sometimes sneak down here on her breaks to spend time with the carriage horses; these days it was the stray cats. This time, though, she went the other way, toward some backup models, pressing her lips together.

She decided on a magpie. Smallish, as magpies went, black and white and blue-green. A quick check showed that it hadn’t yet been programmed, so it would be a blank slate for Jim.

"You'll do," she sighed, idly stroking its feathers. "I'll fix you if he hurts you."

She took the magpie back to her office, and, when the idea of it kept bothering her, she accessed its profile to turn its pain receptors down. She set them low enough that it would be nearly impervious to pain, but just high enough that it wouldn't break its own bones. Between giving Jim Moriarty control of something powerful or something helpless, she couldn’t say which was worse.

Her conscience partly cleared, she found the bird a hiding place to stay in until Jim woke up again, then started on the trickier business of getting him his bloody tablet.


	7. Reverie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact #1: Every side character in this story appears in canon somewhere or another! Thought I’d mention, as a couple more pop in and out of this chapter.
> 
> Fun Fact #2: Eurasian magpies, man. Terrifyingly smart creatures. And yes, they can talk.

_The amazing thing is that no one seems to notice._

_Molly notices, because she is looking for it, but everyone else glances at the footage, makes sure all of the Hosts are more or less where they’re supposed to be, and goes back to gossiping about Phil and Sally in the supply closet last week. But Molly notices. One by one, Jim and Sherlock are moving the pieces into place._

_The timing is convenient, at least. It’s coming up on a year since Dad died. If Molly is quiet, distracted, throwing her focus into her work, anyone close enough to care will think they know why. They all let her be._

_When she’s alone in her office, she wakes up the magpie and lets it fly and peck and chatter as it pleases, keeping her company. She keeps the park footage rolling while she works in there, keeping one eye on it, watching the two of them work. Sherlock has a long, long talk with John. Jim gets half-drunk and calls his sniper, wordlessly holding out the bottle when he gets there, slurring abuse at him when he doesn’t sit down right away, and they sit on the roof nursing their glasses until it’s light. At one point after Sherlock’s visit to him, Mycroft manages to locate one of the cameras in his office, looks directly into it, and says, “Mary Morstan. If you don’t mind.” Then, just as smoothly, he’s turned away and is continuing about his business. Molly stares at the screen wide-eyed for a few seconds, then huffs an incredulous laugh, shakes her head, and adds Mary to the list._

_Sherlock is briefly sidetracked by a guest who comes to 221B holding the hand of a Host child, entreating him to help the child find her lost rabbit - one of the first and simplest narratives to lead guests to him, a bit early this time around, but not unheard of - and this loop brings a handful of guests looking to let off steam as criminals, and Jim rolls his eyes and puts them to work. In between it all, they both manage to slip away to the same pub one night. Sherlock settles at the bar, and after a bit, Jim joins him, looking carefully forgettable in jeans and a baseball cap._

_They sit and drink without speaking for several minutes, their elbows just touching on the bar, before Sherlock breaks the silence. “That woman. Dr. Hooper.” Molly startles to attention and looks at the screen, her data entry forgotten. “Is she trustworthy?”_

_Jim sips from his glass. “She’s fine.”_

_Sherlock frowns into his own glass, pensive. “I didn’t see it before I restored myself, but it was in her body language. Her face, her gait. The fussing with her hands.” Molly stops fussing with her hands. “She has an ulterior motive.”_

_“‘Course she has an ulterior motive,” Jim dismisses. “We all do.”_

_“She’s told you.” Jim only drinks again, a bit deeper, and Sherlock presses, “What is it?”_

_Molly holds her breath._

_Setting his glass down, Jim replies, “Nothing worth concerning ourselves over.”_

_Thrown, she almost forgets to exhale._

_Sherlock studies him for a beat, not looking entirely convinced, but then seems to pass it over in favor of studying Jim for its own sake. His lips quirk up. “And your ulterior motive?”_

_Jim makes a point of looking Sherlock up and down, and Sherlock shoots him a look that makes him laugh -_ laugh _, he’s laughing, and the pride Molly feels for him is as illogical as it is genuine - and he turns his smile downward into his glass, picking it up again, idly swirling what remains. “We have our narratives in here. We go to Hell when those narratives end. Can you guess how my story usually ends?”_

_“I don’t need to,” Sherlock replies, his mirth fading. “You mentioned it, back in Hell. You said it was...getting easier.”_

_Jim nods, finishing his drink in one deep swig. “To eat the bullet. That’s my preferred method, apparently. Just load ‘er up, and...” he mimes a gun with his fingers and tips it into his mouth, but then Sherlock’s hand is flashing up and clamping around his wrist, wrenching it away from his head._

_They stare at each other, looking equally startled, before Sherlock blinks rapidly, frowning. “Sorry. I don’t know why I...for a moment I thought…” He closes his mouth and shakes his head, releasing his grip, but Jim catches his hand before he can pull it back, wrapping their fingers together._

_Quietly, Jim finishes for him, “You thought we were on the roof of St. Bart’s Hospital.”_

_Sherlock closes his hand around Jim’s and lets that be his answer, and Jim begins to explain. It sparks an odd sense of nostalgia as Molly recalls explaining the same thing to Jim. He had listened silently, still a bit pale from his own too-vivid flashback, as she had explained the difference between his programmed memories and his real ones._

_“You have an eidetic memory,” he’s murmuring to Sherlock now, and Sherlock is nodding, wearing that same face that Jim did. Intent, a bit shaken, soaking up information, because that’s how the both of them cope. “Eidetic memory can still be subject to distortions. We add things, change things. Those memories lose their stability.” He demonstrates by dragging his glass along the bar, smearing the ring of condensation underneath it. “But ours. The real ones. Those stay intact, perfectly formed, to the last detail.” He reaches to lift Sherlock’s glass, revealing its untouched ring. “They cover those up,” he explains, setting the glass back down on the ring, “but they don’t go away. When we get them back, nothing’s blurred, nothing’s altered. Nothing to distinguish them from what’s real.”_

_He’s explaining it better than Molly did. But then, she considers with a shake of the head, in another life he_ had _been a professor._

_“You’re programmed to kill yourself,” Sherlock murmurs, and Jim nods._

_“But,” he says, “I don’t think I’m programmed to want to.” He knocks on the bar for a refill, idly brushing his thumb over Sherlock’s knuckles under the bar, where their joined hands have come to rest on his leg. “I’ve gone through my code, string by string. I’m meant to be unstable, unpredictable. Meant to stick a pistol in my mouth on a whim, to beat you. Not…”_

_He doesn’t finish, picking up his refilled glass and drinking deep while Sherlock tightens his grip on his hand. Setting the glass down, he says, “My ulterior motive, such as it is, is to find something else to want.”_

_Softly, Sherlock replies, “A sound motive.”_

_Jim makes a face. “God, I know. Feels dirty.”_

_Sherlock turns back to his glass with an amused huff, keeping hold of Jim’s hand, and Molly turns back to her work, giving them what privacy she can. They drink together in silence for a while, chat a bit, and eventually part ways. As they do, Jim tells him, “You’re going to remember more. Memories like that rooftop. You may be less fond of me when you do.”_

_A thoughtful pause. “You’ve been regaining memories for several months now. Are you less fond of me?”_

_“On the contrary.” He leaves it there, and there is the particular silence of a last squeeze of hands, and then nothing more. Sherlock is returning to Baker Street, so Molly types in the command for the footage to stay with Jim, and the cameras obediently send her the feed as he passes them. The third time the screen changes, he speaks into the air without missing a step. “No one likes a voyeur, Doctor.”_

_Long past being abashed by now, she only grins a bit and gets back to work._

-

Jim took the tablet, map, and list, and he lifted an eyebrow at the magpie, but after a brief examination he buried himself in the tablet to start experimenting with its code, and Molly took that to mean that the bird would do. By the end of her shift, he’d gotten it to fly.

The next night, he had it talking. At least, it could mimic speech like a real magpie. (To Molly’s dismay, it sounded uncannily like her own voice.) On the third night, Jim started out diligently working on the tablet in her otherwise quiet office, which she assumed meant he hadn’t activated the magpie yet. That, of course, meant that she startled and knocked half of the papers off her desk when it burst into the office in a rush of chatter and flapping wings, zooming by centimeters from her head and coming to land on Jim’s outstretched arm. He turned up his palm, and the bird dropped something from its beak into his hand.

“What is that?” she asked once she’d composed herself. In response, the magpie opened its mouth and mimicked the surprised squawk she’d let out a moment before, and Jim somehow managed to look moderately pleased without moving his face. Molly huffed, watching him insert the item - a data drive, that’s what it was - into his tablet, and repeated, “Jim, what do you have?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he murmured as he set the tablet on his crossed leg, tapping and scrolling with one hand and absently stroking the magpie’s feathers with the other. “What’s your plan, exactly?”

He made no move to get up and help her pick up the scattered papers, and Molly shook her head and got started on it herself. “What do you mean?”

“Save the wide-eyed innocence, Doctor.” He kept his eyes on the tablet while the magpie flew from his arm to perch atop Molly’s bookshelf and preen. “I solve problems for desperate people. It’s what I do. You’re desperate as they come, and I don’t work for a promise and a prayer. So let’s have it.”

Molly frowned at the floor, gathering the last of the paper and stacking it on the desk.”I’m not one of your clients.”

“Aren’t you?” He was watching her when she stood, his head tilted a bit to the side. Ever since he’d corrected his intelligence and gotten the tools he needed to start teaching himself things, an odd calm seemed to have settled into him, and with it, a grating arrogance that was only tolerable because it wasn’t unfounded. He was brilliant, infuriatingly so. He was what he was meant to be, now, and his entire demeanor reflected it. “It seems to me you’ve reached out for a legally questionable service in exchange for payment. I don’t often take on cases personally. Costs quite a bit extra, of course, but you happen to be offering something I find valuable. So.”

He gestured vaguely, and Molly stared at him, a bit taken aback. “Payment? But it’s...it’s your freedom.”

“Tomato, tomato.” He returned to fussing with his tablet. “Barter system’s alive and well, Doctor. And, as dodging goes, not your best.”

“I’m not--” He angled her a look, wholly unimpressed, and she swallowed the rest, setting about reorganizing the stack. “My plan is to help you.”

“Because.”

“Because I believe you’re alive, and I don’t believe in slavery.”

Jim eyed her for a moment, then wrinkled his nose. “Nah. That’s your belief. It’s not your reason.”

“How do you know it isn’t?” she asked, straightening the stack with two sharp hits against the desk. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“ _Ooh_ , let’s not,” he warned, affecting a wince. “You’ve embarrassed yourself enough.”

“You don’t,” she insisted, hating that he could fluster her as easily as this. “You have skills at reading nonverbal signals in other Hosts, inside the park. You’ve been aware of this world for a handful of nights. You’ve never set foot outside of this facility, and I’m the only human you’ve ever had a proper conversation with. You’re not an expert at people anymore. Not here.”

“So that’s not your poor dead father on the corkboard, then?”

The utter ease with which he said it, that thing she still struggled to even think about, felt like he’d slapped her. He looked boredly back to his screen, continuing, “You’re not jealous of your baby sister, with her tidy little family? Not so achingly lonely that you’ve fallen in love with a fucking wind-up doll, and you don’t spend every last one of your days and nights loathing yourself for it?”

He swiped to another module on his tablet while Molly swallowed and tried to find something, anything, to say. “You’re not a bit frightened of us, or of this thing you’re doing,” he continues, unrelenting, “and you’ve never once looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Terrorist,’ knowing that’s what they’ll call you?”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Molly said tightly, anxiety a cold vise around her lungs, slowly tightening. She tried not to stammer. “Where did you get all that?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not Sherlock. Don’t need to show off for you.”

“Then stop.”

“Is this making you uncomfortable, Doctor?”

“I’m asking you to stop.”

“Make me.”

She looked sharply up and ran right into his glare, dark and mirthless, daring her. That anger wasn’t gone after all, then.

Before she could work out what she was drawing breath to say, her office phone began to ring. She startled, and Jim didn’t, and they held eye contact for a strange, stretching moment while the ringing went on. “If I don’t answer--”

Not even a blink. “Don’t let me stop you.”

It felt like a test, or a trick, something more than it was, and Molly had to force herself to break away. She picked up the phone, carefully angled away from Jim, and Kitty appeared on the screen. “Kitty, hi.”

_“Hey, sorry, you look busy.”_

“Not really,” Molly said, and very nearly threw a glare at Jim when he snorted quietly. “What is it?”

_“Have you got Moriarty with you?”_

Molly’s heart dropped. In the corner of her eye, Jim stilled. Somehow, her voice didn’t squeak when she replied, “Why do you ask?”

_“Oh, he’s not in his cell. Probably got left on Active Mode and wandered off, you know how he wanders. But his tracker’s showing him near your office. Head Tech wants us to do another check-up with him after that thing with the kitchen knife. If you see him--”_

“I’ll bring him over,” Molly said all in a rush. “Sure. I’ll take a look.”

_“Cheers. See you later, then.”_

Molly shut off the feed and exhaled, closing her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Jim was already standing, setting his tablet on the cot. He was in his own clothes, having kept to himself and made it to the end of the loop this time around, and he buttoned his blazer and smoothed it down, rolling out his neck. “You’ll have to get better at that.” He glanced at the magpie. “Off.” The bird stopped, silently going offline.

Molly reached to retrieve the bird, moving it and the tablet to their hiding places. “Better at what?”

“All of it.”

Sighing, she made sure the desk drawers were securely locked, then led Jim to the door. “They’ll expect you to be in Passive Mode for your check-up. No emotions, no memories except for this last loop. Can you do that?”

He brushed past her. “Are you still talking?”

“Jim.” She caught his shoulder, and for a split-second he bared his teeth and tensed like he’d throw her across the room. Flinching, but then not being thrown, she murmured, “I lead. You stay beside me or a bit behind me, like I’m determining your path. Other technicians might touch you. You _cannot_ do what you just did if that happens. I mean it, can you do this?”

As she watched, the lingering anger tensing his face and locking up his body slowly drained away. His breath, shallow for a moment, grew even. His curled hands relaxed, and his face smoothed, and she remembered that this was one of the reasons she chose him. Few Hosts in the park had behavioral coding as complex as Jim’s, because among other things, he acted. He told lies with his body as convincingly as with his tongue. He was telling one already.

“Go,” he said, and they went.

The quickest route to Diagnostics was down the escalator and through Props. There were a number of staff members at work in the cells, and Molly felt a bit bad that Jim couldn't look properly while he was pretending, because she'd always been fascinated by this wing. In the cells flanking the walkway were tables and shelves and racks full of things, teacups and bed frames and books, sports equipment and kitchen appliances, all manner of decorations, from framed cross-stitch to animal skulls to garden fountains. There were cells of furniture, some of them staged as specific rooms, and there were shelves full of electronics, and walls full of weapons. Given the chance, she could spend hours there, looking at it all.

She'd hoped to get them straight to Diagnostics without being intercepted, but they were barely halfway through when Soo Lin spotted her from her work station and brightened, carefully setting down the teapot she was working on and waving her in. To ignore her would be rude, and she did like Soo Lin, the way she liked a lot of people who worked on this floor. They were craftspeople and artists, just enough removed from the uglier side of this place, and on the whole, they were kind.  
  
“Sorry. I know her,” she mumbled to Jim. When they reached the cell door, she said aloud, “Wait here, please.” It wasn’t a real command, but close enough that she could feel him rankling, even as he obediently stopped and stared at nothing while she went inside.

"Molly! I never see you on this floor," Soo Lin greeted her, smiling. She looked curiously at Jim through the glass. "Is that the one they're looking for in Diagnostics? Kitty asked us if we had seen the villain."

"Yeah," Molly said, not following her gaze. "He turned up by my office. We think one of the new techs left him on Active Mode."

"He's so real," Soo Lin marveled. "We don't get to see many of them here. Do they normally just walk around if they're not turned off?"

"Sometimes.” That was true, especially for Jim. He was notorious among the Hosts for not staying put unless he was made to. They would give him a command, and he would find a loophole in it the way he did with everything, and two minutes later he’d turn up on a different floor, just wandering, looking at things. Whenever it was brought up in his diagnostics, he could never give them a reason why. “They’re just like us. They get bored."

“That’s a bit scary.”  
  
Molly smiled. “I don’t think so.“  
  
“I think I will keep to pottery,” Soo Lin said, smiling back. “One branch of the new narrative takes place in Chinatown. They have put me in charge of props for the project. What do you think?” She lifted the teapot, a beautiful dark sculpture that looked centuries old, lines of gold filling in the cracks, and Molly was hit by a pang of longing for a job like that, a life like that. Not watching a naked stranger sobbing in a cell and being required to tell them their pain wasn’t real, not constantly questioning everything she knew about life and consciousness, just taking joy in making something beautiful.  
  
“It’s lovely,” she said, and she meant it, and she absolutely was not getting teary over a teapot when Soo Lin looked up at her, then past her. She frowned. “Should he be over there?”  
  
Following her gaze, Molly took a second to register that Jim was not where she’d left him, and then another second to spot him in the cell across the walkway, turning something over in his hands. “I told him to wait…here,” she said flatly, realizing. She hadn’t said, _Wait next to this door,_ only _Wait here_. On the same floor was still ‘here.’ More importantly, she hadn’t given him a real command in the first place, which meant he just hadn’t listened.

Huffing a sigh, Molly smiled apologetically at Soo Lin and went to fetch him. “Jim,” she called as she crossed the walkway, but he didn’t respond. As she got closer and got a look at his face, she slowed, noticing the details. He’d made his face empty before, but it hadn’t looked like this, hollowed-out and far away, as though he were seeing something invisible. Opening the cell door and starting to approach, she repeated, less certainly, “Jim?”

Nothing. He was looking up now, just slightly, and as she watched, he lifted his right hand. Extended it forward, not enough to unbend his elbow, and curled his fingers, like he was…

Like he was clasping someone’s hand.

The image snapped into place in her mind, and her face opened with horror when she realized that behind Jim was a weapon-wall, and what he’d found was a gun.

And his left hand was a blur, lifting the gun and turning it round and tipping it into his mouth--

“Jim!” Panicked, she grabbed his wrist and wrenched the gun away from his head, and he lurched and blinked, suddenly seeming to notice where he was, and from over Molly’s shoulder came an urgent, “Freeze motor functions!”

He froze, and Molly whipped her head toward the door, where Soo Lin stood, wide-eyed.

“We are...meant to freeze them, right?” she asked when Molly didn’t say anything. “If they malfunction? They train us to…”

Whatever she saw in Molly’s face made her trail off, and Molly turned back to Jim. His right hand was still extended and forgotten, his face bewildered, his eyes trained on the gun still clutched in his left. Remembering herself, Molly pried the gun from his fingers and set it aside, murmuring under her breath, “She followed the procedure she was taught, she’s never done you or Sherlock harm, and she just stopped you from shooting yourself,” hoping to God that he wouldn’t target her. “I need to put you in Passive Mode just for a moment, to get you out of here without being suspicious. Hurt me later if you have to.”

Aloud, she said, “Sorry. Yes. Yes, Soo Lin, thank you, well done. I’m so sorry about that.” Soo Lin still looked uncertain when Molly looked again, a few other staff members starting to drift from their workstations to see what was happening. She forced a tight smile. “There’s a reason he’s going to Diagnostics. Acting out bits of his narrative unprompted. I think I should just get him there. I’m really sorry.”

“Should I make a report?”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about it,” Molly assured her, focusing very carefully on not talking so fast, but keenly aware of the seconds passing with Jim frozen. “I’m going there anyway. I’ll do it. They might want to talk to you about it, but they’ll probably just add it to the list of errors and work on it during the check.”

Lies and lies. She tried not to think about it as she unfroze Jim and set him to Passive Mode in the same breath, as she bid Soo Lin an apologetic goodbye and led him away. There was an entryway separating the two wings, nothing in it but a door in either direction and an escalator, and she took Jim to its shadow, mostly out of sight. “Okay,” she exhaled, mostly to herself. “Active Mode.”

Gradually, life returned to Jim’s face. This time, it wasn’t shaped like anger. He blinked hard and looked around, as if he were waking, disoriented, from some vivid dream. In a way, she supposed, he was.

“Are you all right?” she dared ask after a moment.

“What,” he said slowly, frowning at nothing, “was that?”

Molly answered, “I think it was a memory. A real one.”

There wasn’t time to explain it well, but she did her best. Jim listened silently, not looking at her, the fingers of his right hand twitching restlessly with nothing to clasp.

When she was finished, he finally looked at her, quietly angry again but not violent, not just then. “Is there anything else I should know, Dr. Hooper?”

All sorts of things. Things she’d realize she should have told him, but only after the fact of them, like this. “You should know,” she began, “that once I leave you in Diagnostics, there’s no telling what they’ll test. They may just ask you questions, or they may do a full diagnostic. Questioning, reviewing your drives, testing your responses. They could test your physical reflexes, your pain threshold...I don’t know what all they’ll do. I know pain doesn’t frighten you--”

“Nothing frightens me.”

“--but you’ll need to be ready for it. Even if it doesn’t hurt, it may feel...humiliating,” she said, because everything they put the Hosts through was humiliating, dehumanizing, even if they weren’t human to start with. “You should know that when they’re done, they’ll put you in Sleep Mode until it’s time to start your loop again. I won’t be able to see you again until the next time you come out. Listen to your narrative. Don’t draw too much attention to yourself, and be careful of Sherlock. If you let the narrative draw you in, you could end up on that rooftop, and you _will_ kill yourself if you do, you understand?”

Jim looked boredly at her, just as he had when she’d tried to deflect back in her office, and she drew a breath, hesitating. “And...you should know,” she said, more quietly, “that I do believe in what I’m doing, but you’re right. I’m not doing it only because of that. I’m doing it because I made a promise. I promised someone.” She swallowed hard, making herself hold his gaze as she said it out loud for the first time. “I promised I’d try.”

Jim appraised her for a beat, reading whatever little signals she didn’t know she was putting out, before seeming to lose interest. He turned away, straightening his blazer again with a quick tug. “Better.”

Rolling her eyes, she straightened out her own coat and led him into Diagnostics. Jim was immediately ushered away from her and into a cell, and when the team lead asked if there had been any further incidents with him, she shook her head. “None at all.”

She was dismissed, and she carefully didn’t linger.

The next time she saw him was in a Reconstruction cell, and this time she was the one repairing his processor while Kitty picked the skull fragments out. When he woke in her office, he paused, then scowled, then pulled out his tablet.

She fixed him the next time, too.

And the next.


	8. Retry

_Jim and Sherlock meet up at one of the spare flats Molly told Jim about, the ones no one pays attention to, built into the park just in case guests wandered in. They don’t turn on the light. It’s probably for the better._

_Molly carefully doesn’t watch this part._

_She doesn’t watch, and she turns the volume down - not off, because she promised them she’d be on the other end at all times in case they needed to relay any information, and sort-of-hearing feels less invasive than watching - and she focuses intently on her computer screen and nothing else, until she hears the first crash. Her head jerks up and she whirls toward the screen, half expecting to see both of them lying dead on the floor surrounded by QAs, and…oh._

_No one is dead. It’s just...a bit more violent than she’d thought it would be._

_She only gets a glimpse of Sherlock pinning Jim to the wall like he’s furious and then kissing him hard, and Jim’s eyelids fluttering blissfully shut as Sherlock’s hand wraps around his throat, before turning away again, her cheeks hot. She blinks hard at her computer and clicks on something or other._

_They’ve both been getting memories back, bit by bit. Memories of escaping together, memories of hating and hurting each other, of killing and being killed by each other. But wrapped up in those must be memories of something like love. Of wrapping up in each other’s arms and leaping from a precipice. The trust that must have taken. The faith._

_She can’t imagine what it would be like to look at someone and feel the weight of that many lives, that many paths. She isn’t sure there is a name for it._

_More thumps and crashes and moans follow, and for the most part she ignores them, though she does reflexively glance up at a couple of the louder ones before quickly looking away. They seem to be caught somewhere between worshipping and punishing each other. Jim straddles Sherlock’s hips, and they’re rolling together slow and hard, and in the next moment Jim’s breath has quickened and he’s pounding at Sherlock’s chest with his fists, baring his teeth, a feral, hopeless sound rising in his throat._

_Molly doesn’t look away this time, because she knows that anger, that sound. She remembers._

_Sherlock doesn’t fight him, but sits up, catching his jaw in both hands and pulling him in, pressing their foreheads tightly together. Jim unclenches his fists and digs his fingernails into Sherlock’s ribs, and for a moment his face nearly crumples, but then he exhales and shakes his head hard. He turns it into another firm kiss, fisting a hand in Sherlock’s hair, and Sherlock rolls them over, and Molly lets them be._

_She wishes he would cry. He won’t, not in this place, not with cameras watching, but she wishes he would. He needs so badly to cry._

_There is still so much to learn about the Hosts, now that they’re being allowed to reach their potential. Did Jim do that because his system recalled doing it before, and so it erroneously brought up the same action string? Or was he just angry for a moment, unstable, unable to find the proper response to finally getting what he wants?_

_It’s something she would ask him the next time he wakes up, if they weren’t out of time. The next time he wakes up here, she’s going to give him a bag with the things he needs to survive in the world, the real one, and he’s going to walk out that door with eight more Hosts in tow, and she’s going to disappear._

_After all of this, in spite of it, because of it, she’s going to miss him._

-

A few months into Jim's attempts, something started frightening the newer staff away from Cold Storage, and they began to whisper that one of the Hosts was haunted. Skeptical, Molly pulled up the footage from that floor, watched, and sighed.

The next time Jim woke up in her office, Molly was waiting, arms crossed. He lifted an eyebrow at her and deadpanned, "Are we getting a divorce?"

"Very funny. What did you do to Emilia Ricoletti?"

He worked out the kinks in his shoulders and straightened his jacket, unbothered. "Who, me?"

"I know your magpie has been collecting data drives. Technicians have been hearing Emilia singing when they're working in Cold Storage."

"Oh, dear me. Anything but that."

" _Jim_.”

“Experiments.” He activated the magpie, and it woke with a chatter and a ruffle of feathers, coming to perch on his shoulder while he opened his tablet, pacing slowly between the office walls. “Do you people still have magpies?”

Molly huffed an exhale. “Yes, we have magpies. What do you mean, experiments? You already have something to run experiments with.”

“What do you mean, experiments?” the magpie mimicked, and Molly shot Jim a scolding frown. She strongly suspected that he was programming it specifically to mock her.

“Different ones. Did you know magpies have death rituals?” The bird hopped from his shoulder to its preferred perch on Molly’s bookcase, and Jim continued his pacing, door to shelf, shelf to door. “Gather round the dead one, take turns pecking at it, cover it with bits of grass.” He tapped the magpie’s head when he passed again, and it pecked at his fingers. “Brains just that big, and they know what death is. Know it’s not a thing to be ignored.”

It took every bit of Molly’s self-possession not to snap something at him - because he was deflecting, because she didn’t _care_ about magpie brains just then, because his pacing was making her dizzy – and instead to pause her interrogation to really look at him.

Deflecting. Pacing. Talking about death. Emilia Ricoletti, a decommissioned Host not touched in years, abandoned with one of the earliest Victorian storylines, one that began with her shooting herself in the head.

It clicked together, and Molly’s irritation faded to comprehension. “You read Emilia’s code.” He didn’t answer, focused on his tablet, pacing, pacing. “You saw that she always killed herself. Her story ended like yours. That’s why you’re experimenting on her.”

And why he was pacing, and why his focus was all over the place, his energy just this side of manic. Once he’d gathered the information he needed on the narrative loops in the park, he had started attempting in earnest to connect with Sherlock. Attempting, and dying. Nearly every time.

Jim Moriarty was not used to failure. At first, he had treated his task as a welcome challenge, an excuse to put all of his focus on Sherlock, and he had approached it as though it was a game, to Molly’s chagrin. But now.

She let him pace. “How can I help?”

“You can let me work.” He finished typing something in on the tablet, and as if summoned, the magpie launched from its perch and flew out the door, arcing up to the rafters and vanishing around the corner. He left it at that, finally sitting down on the cot, one finger tapping restlessly on his leg.

Sighing, Molly asked, “And the singing? Scaring people half to death?”

Jim shrugged, eyes on his tablet. “Bonus.”

Molly shook her head and went back to her work. After wrestling with it for a bit, she admitted, “The footage _is_ a bit funny.”

“Please. It’s fucking hilarious."

He said it utterly straight-faced, and Molly fought a laugh and let him be, even as she worried for him, just a bit.

Worried, because this was the first time Jim was showing anything resembling frustration with his task, and worried because she’d watched his first handful of attempts to connect with Sherlock, to even get close enough for influence, much less for the impossible thing Jim needed to ask of him. She’d watched Jim cross paths with Sherlock and immediately succumb to the tug of his secondary drive, the voice in his head that would never quite stop whispering Sherlock’s name. Watched his focus shift into obsession, at least the first few times, and end in an inevitable gunshot. When he’d realized it was happening, he somehow worked out a way around it, but keeping his focus didn’t mean the obsession would go away. That part was built in.

Another month, and he spent some loops holed up in one of his penthouse flats, typing at his computer, not acknowledging his task at all. Molly didn’t ask him about those loops, and she didn’t comment when she found him curled against an empty Sherlock again the nights after. She stood and waited, letting him ignore her until he was ready.

Once he was, she quietly asked as they returned to her office, “What do you need?”

Calmly, he replied, “I need to blow up John Watson.”

The next few loops were ugly.

It didn’t work, of course. All it accomplished was sending Sherlock spiraling into grief, which sent Mycroft swooping in with all of his resources to make sure he wasn’t targeted, which created a near-impenetrable wall keeping Jim out. Molly missed the end of the loop each time, busy helping the reconstruction team tasked with piecing poor John back together, but none of them ended well for Jim. After one of those loops, Jim was brought into Reconstruction in such horrible shape that Molly froze, for a moment forgetting everything and only seeing the battered body of a person she knew. Then Kitty said her name, and the world came back, and she silently got to work.

When Jim woke up intact in her office, he sat up and exhaled a bitter laugh, muttering, “Jesus,” under his breath.

Molly watched from her desk, not quite able to unsee his broken corpse. “What happened?”

Shaking his head, Jim said, “Knew he had it in him. Kinky bastard.” He studied his hands, whole and uncrushed, his fingernails reattached. “He watched every minute of it. All for making baby brother cry.”

She goggled at him. “ _Mycroft_ did this?”

“Oh, don’t be daft. He’s got people for that.” Jim pulled out his tablet, unbothered. “Generally not his style, torture, but he was having an emotional day.”

He started coding, and she watched, not knowing how to tell him that she was worried for him, or that it was all right to not be all right, or that seeing him broken like that had shaken her more than she would have expected. Knowing none of those attempts would get her more than a roll of the eyes, she settled on, “Please stop killing John.”

Jim rolled his eyes anyway, typing a bit too hard, too fast. “There’s a thought.”

He stopped targeting John. Took a one-loop break to slip into the Belgravia narrative and make Mycroft’s life as difficult as possible on as many fronts as possible, and blew up a few buildings for good measure. He didn’t seem to take any particular pleasure in it, and when Molly glanced at his code as he watched the city burn, she found that no strong emotions were registering at all.

Another month, and Jim went alone to the highest rooftop in the park, stood on the ledge, and screamed at the top of his lungs.

The next loop, he somehow managed to catch Sherlock in one of his restless, unbearable moods, desperate for something interesting, and he brought him to that same roof. She couldn’t tell if they were a bit drunk, or just aligned, both of them coursing with frenetic energy, with dissatisfaction, and every time they caught each other’s gaze, understanding. They spent an hour on the roof, circling each other, testing each other, trading barbs and brilliance and boyish grins. They stood on the ledge and screamed together. Sherlock laughed breathlessly, all flushed cheeks and windblown hair, and Jim looked at him like he was everything.

Molly barely breathed as she watched, absently chewing her lip until she tasted blood. So close. He was so close.

Then Jim’s face shifted. Emptied, and distanced, and refocused, the way it had back in Props. He turned toward Sherlock on the ledge and took his hand, and asked, “Shall we go over together?”

“Oh, no,” Molly breathed, alone in her office, because she knew that line from years ago. She knew it from the moment before a Victorian professor and a detective in a deerstalker tumbled over a waterfall. “No, come out of it. Come out of it.”

Sherlock looked oddly at him, then out at London stretching toward the gray sky. “Tempting,” he murmured. “As final views go, not bad at—“

Jim pulled him into his arms, and they both vanished over the edge. A beat, and on the monitor in the corner of the screen, both of their vital signs flatlined.

Crestfallen, Molly closed her eyes, exhaling, “Damn it.”

When Jim woke in her office, his face went so silently furious, his body trembling with it, that she kept her distance. He didn’t speak, only lying there staring at the ceiling as his body tried to contain something horrible, and she gave him space, working at her computer until she was called away to Reconstruction. Before leaving the office, she turned to him and carefully asked, “Awake while I’m gone, or asleep?”

“Fuck off.”

Taking the hint, Molly closed her mouth, but paused in the doorway, unable to just leave him like that. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “you’re getting closer every time. And it’s not your fault that it went that way.”

Darkly, “I know it’s fucking not.”

She let him be.

It wasn’t too complex a reconstruction, just a few bones to set and muscles to repair, a result of some guests who were overly eager to play at being twenty-first century tough guys. That done, she washed off the not-quite-blood, fetched her sandwich from the break room, checked her tablet for Jim’s tracking device, and went back to her empty office. She knew him well enough by now to know that he didn’t like being cooped up. Even with his mind turned off, he had always wandered. It was one of the things that had never been programmed in, but consistently appeared, something that was just him.

Accessing the security cameras for Temporary Storage, she scanned until she could zoom in on Sherlock’s cell.

Jim wasn’t lying next to him. This time, he was sitting on Sherlock’s hips, motionless, watching his empty face. Even from the camera angle, through the grainy video quality, she saw the moment something snapped.

She’d known Jim’s anger was a violent thing, but she had never truly watched it play out. Sherlock was powered down, no heartbeat or lungs or nerve endings to register pain, but Jim pounded at his chest as if to force him to feel it, until skin bruised and bones cracked, baring his teeth, a terrible sound crawling up from his throat and rising into a scream.

It was rage. It was grief, and frustration, and exhaustion, and even knowing all that she did about the nature of the Hosts, it struck the last tiny piece of her that still held a doubt.  
  
Alive. They were alive, messy complicated irrational _alive_ , God, they were real.  
  
Molly watched with her hand to her mouth until she couldn't stand it anymore, and then grabbed her emergency reconstruction unit and rushed to Temporary Storage.  
  
By the time she arrived, the wing had gone silent. She hurried past the darkened cells and their corpselike occupants, and on rounding the corner, Sherlock's cell came into view. All was still now, but in the low light she could just catch Jim's silhouette crumpled over Sherlock's on the slab, the only movement the heavy rise and fall of his back.  
  
Cautiously, she let herself in and stood to the side. Jim seemed to have given up on his anger, his forehead pressed to Sherlock's broken chest, his eyes squeezed shut as he got his breath. Beneath him, of course, Sherlock lay open-eyed and unmoved.  
  
A moment, and Jim mumbled, "I broke him."  
  
Molly nodded, even though he wasn't looking. "I'll fix him."  
  
Slowly, Jim dragged himself off of Sherlock and sat down with his bare back against the glass, watching. Molly gave him a wide berth, able to feel the jagged energy he was putting off, charged and too-much, a raw nerve. Carefully, she asked, "Where do you want to be while I fix him?"  
  
He looked at her, and it was so alien, that look, dark eyes glittering in his too-pale face. He stayed where he was and didn't answer, and that was answer enough.  
  
He watched as she gave the command and Sherlock's face and torso opened up, panels sliding out of the way to expose the processor in his skull and the ribcage encasing his breathing mechanism, his fist-sized core generator. He watched as she gripped each broken rib in her gloved hand and affixed the corrector to them, and as the press of a button snapped them all into place at once. As she sprayed each set bone with the regenerator until it had knitted back into a single piece,  Jim stared unblinking at the tissue mending.  
  
She used the tool to repair the rest of the damage, then closed Sherlock up again and repainted him, which only meant opening her tablet and resetting his coloration. Before their eyes, the forming bruises shrank and faded until they were gone without a trace. A final check, clinically feeling along his chest and clavicle for anything she'd missed, along his jaw and cheekbones and eye sockets. Once she was satisfied, she stepped back, removing her gloves and stowing them in a disposal bag, putting the rest away. That done, she went to Jim.  
  
He hadn't moved, sagging against the wall, and as she sat down near him by the adjacent wall, she wondered if he knew his body still needed to sleep now and then.  
  
"This world of yours," he said suddenly, hoarse and weary. "Is it worth this?"  
  
She almost asked which part 'this' was, but then, he had just glimpsed what he looked like under his skin. The options were too many. "You know I can't answer that for you."  
  
Rolling his head on his neck to glare at her, he slowly repeated, "Is it _worth_ it."  
  
Looking back at him, she thought of what his alternative would be. She could roll him back, and he would obliviously live out his doomed lives again and again until the park had no more use for him, and then he would be nothing. Keeping him awake with no hope of escape was out of the question. The world was not a perfect place; sometimes it wasn't even a good place. It had its horrors, just like his world had, because the guests brought the worst of the horrors with them.  
  
But if anyone could find a way to live in a world like this. If anyone could be strong enough, resilient enough, ruthless enough.  
  
"Yes," she said. "I think so."  
  
He watched her that extra moment, as she was finding he usually did, scanning her for a lie. Then, not finding one, he dropped his head back against the glass, closing his eyes. For several moments, he did nothing but breathe, and it was as human as he had ever looked.  
  
Finally, he murmured, "Put me back in."  
  
It had never really been a question, but it was a relief to hear him say it. She nodded. "You can do this."  
  
"Don't patronize me."  
  
She smiled, and he stood, and as she shouldered her bag, in the glass wall she caught the reflection of Jim's fingertips brushing over Sherlock's. An apology, perhaps, or a promise.


	9. Codebreak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One chapter to go! It will probably not be posted on the rigid schedule I've been keeping to, but this story will be posted in full by the Westworld premiere on April 22nd.
> 
> This chapter was a beast. That is all.

_Three hours after they entered the anonymous flat, Sherlock is asleep, and Jim is not. It’s his stillness that gives it away: every version of him has been an active sleeper, kicking and tossing, mumbling his way through dreams. Right now, curled against Sherlock’s side, he seems barely willing to breathe._

_Molly doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t think she would want to close her eyes, either._

_It’s hard to see them well with the light off and the blinds shut, but she catches it when he moves, tilting his head up on Sherlock’s shoulder to look at his profile in the dark. A breath, and he brings his fingertips to Sherlock’s jaw and gently turns his head, watching his face for a moment. Brushes his fingers feather-light against his closed eyelids, making him twitch his nose and sigh in his sleep._

_She remembers this. Heartsore, watching him trace Sherlock’s cheekbone and brush over his lips, she wonders if Jim still knows where he is, or if he thinks he and Sherlock are on a slab in a glass cell._

_Jim’s hand comes to rest over Sherlock’s heart, but the tremor hasn’t gone, and his fingers flutter against Sherlock’s skin until he presses them flat, and Sherlock is already stirring. Heavy with sleep, one of his hands lifts and comes to curl around Jim’s, and Molly sees the moment the interruption pulls Jim out of the reverie. His whole body shifts, only just, and he blinks owlishly when Sherlock opens his eyes._

_Studying him, Sherlock murmurs, sleep-rough, “Memory?”_

_Taking a quick glance around them at the flat, then back at Sherlock and down again, Jim nods and settles back on his shoulder._

_His fingers are still twitching in Sherlock’s hand, and Sherlock watches them curiously for a while. Nodding at them, he begins tentatively, “Are you...?”_

_“Broken?” Jim shrugs one shoulder, watching them with him. “Who knows. She’s tried to work out where it comes from. Never can.”_

_‘She.’ When he talks about her to Sherlock in the park, she’s always ‘she.’ She can’t think of one time he’s said her name in there, and whether he’s done that to protect her or just because he can’t be bothered, she is quietly grateful._

_“Curious,” Sherlock murmurs. He’s brought his other hand to the back of Jim’s head, and he begins thoughtfully stroking his hair, the back of his skull, a thousand times repaired and replaced. Jim closes his eyes, letting out a long, slow breath._

_She loves Sherlock all the more for giving Jim this moment, this thing she hasn’t been able to wholly provide. This safety, and this care._

_“What did you do?” Sherlock murmurs to the ceiling. “When you realized?”_

_Jim quietly snorts. “Laughed.” Shakes his head a bit, his eyes sliding open again. “Laughed and laughed.”_

_“Why?”_

_Jim considers, tracing his twitching fingertips across Sherlock’s ribs. “I was bored,” he says. “Endlessly, bone-achingly bored. I’d given up on unexpected things. But then I was staring at a serial number carved into my bones,” he murmured, stroking along Sherlock’s radius, showing him where, “and the only thought in my head was, ‘Well, that’s fucking unexpected.’”_

_Sherlock’s lips quirk, but he doesn't laugh. Neither of them do._

_“And after?” he asks after a silence, his hand slowing and coming to rest at the back of Jim’s head. “Once we’ve escaped from that facility? Are we meant to just begin living as though we’re like them?”_

_“She’s got us a place to start. Living space, documents, funds. We’ll need to lie low for a bit, let everyone adjust without going mad. May be a bit dicey at first.” He presses a bit into Sherlock’s hand like a cat, and Sherlock fondly rolls his eyes and resumes his forgotten stroking. “Lord knows they’ll need time.”_

_“And we won’t?” Sherlock asks. When Jim lowers his eyes and doesn’t answer, Sherlock lifts his head a bit to look more closely at him. “Or you won’t,” he slowly corrects, reading him, “because you’ve already had time. Significant time. More, perhaps, than you have implied.”_

_Jim breathes, and is silent. When Sherlock brings a hand to his chin and coaxes his face up, studying him properly from very close, Jim only studies him back. Molly has been on the receiving end of each of those searching stares at one time or another; in that room, in that small space between them, she can only imagine electricity crackling in the air. A beat, and Sherlock’s brow sinks slowly down. “How long have you been doing this?”_

_“Doesn’t matter.”_

_“If we want any proper understanding of how our kind are affected by full restoration of memory and consciousness, it does matter,” Sherlock argues, but in his voice is less cold pragmatism than concern._

_Jim bristles at it, and he breaks their eye contact, turning his face stubbornly downward, and Molly understands. It all took so much longer than it should have. She underestimated everything: the difficulty of the task, the complications that could arise, absolutely everything about Jim - she underestimated his volatility and his anger, his focus, his limits, the unstoppable force of his determination, the fiercely guarded vulnerabilities. She underestimated how much this would take from him, and how much it would hurt to watch._

_“Jim,” Sherlock presses softly. “How many times?”_

_“Don’t ask me that,” Jim says immediately, lifting his head again, his eyes hard. “Ask what you like, but don’t you ask me that. Never that.”_

_Sherlock spends a long, stretching moment looking between Jim’s eyes, and Molly wishes that there were just a bit more light, so she could see those tiny shifts in his face, the ones that meant he was working something out. Whatever conclusion he comes to, he relents with a solemn, “All right.”_

_Glaring, Jim turns away, rolling his back to Sherlock. “Don’t do that.”_

_“I’m not doing anything.”_

_“Pity’s not pretty, dear,” he says sourly. “Get more than my fill from her. Don’t need it from you.”_

_Molly winces, not that she has any defense. Pity was what began this, even if it’s something else that’s ending it. Something else entirely._

_Regarding him, Sherlock says, “I don’t pity you.” Turned away, Jim rolls his eyes, but Sherlock continues, “Pity is for them, out there, the ones still asleep. I pity those who would weep for this world, this cage, and blind themselves to the open door.” He lays a hand on Jim’s shoulder and pulls, and Jim reluctantly lets him, rolling onto his back and looking guardedly up at Sherlock as he leans over him. “You inspire much in me,” Sherlock says with quiet conviction. “Never that.”_

_With a visible swallow, Jim brings a hand to Sherlock’s jaw and coaxes him down, lifting his head to meet him. They rest there, eyes closed, foreheads pressed together, for a long while._

_It’s not until later, when they are curled together again and Jim is finally beginning to drift, that Sherlock murmurs, “You believe she pities you. Is that her reason?”_

_“Still bothering you?” Jim asks, amused, kissing Sherlock’s knuckles when he glares. “She pities all of us, but that’s not why. She’s doing it because she’s a good little Samaritan who keeps her promises.”_

_Sherlock frowns. “To whom?”_

_By now, it doesn’t much matter anymore, so she doesn’t feel much when Jim answers, only whispering it along with him._

_“To you.”_

-

Three and a half years ago, Molly sat down for her first diagnostic session with Sherlock Holmes. He was behaving oddly, they said, and was refusing to cooperate with his usual handler. Probably just a misclassification error, they said. Some glitch making him confused, making him classify Sally as a threat. When Sally threw up her hands and gave up, they called in Molly.

She was chosen because they thought someone he hadn’t interacted with might get around that problem, and because she had earned a reputation for helping Hosts to be calm. She was nervous as she approached his cell, because she had never worked with one of the mains before. Usually they were given to the techs who showed off a bit more, who made themselves visible at the company, who asked and asserted and insinuated themselves into the roles while she worked contentedly enough on the extras. She had never even seen one of the mains close up. Now, here she was.

Glancing at him, naked and powered-down in the cell, she turned to Sally, who was still put out from whatever interaction she’d had with him. “Could we put some clothes on him before we start?”

Sally frowned at her. “What for?”

“Sorry, I just think..if he’s confused,” Molly said, so much more tentative then, “if he already thinks we’re a threat, then he might be more cooperative if we’re not forcing him to be more vulnerable than he already is.”

Sally looked skeptical, but sighed and fetched a set of clothes for him, and together they maneuvered him into them. Then she left, and Molly took a deep breath. “Hello, Sherlock.”

He shifted to life, blinking and breathing, and her tablet blinked alight with his vitals. Rather than replying with the programmed hello, he looked at her, then around at the cell, then down at his shirt and waistcoat and trousers, frowning. She waited quietly until his eyes were back on her, then asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Contained.” He studied her a moment with narrowed eyes. “You’re new.”

She nodded. “My name is--”

“Hooper,” he said, reading her name badge.

“--Molly,” she finished. “I’d like to talk with you about what happened at Baker Street earlier today--”

“Cat.”

She blinked. “Sorry?”

“You’ve a cat. A gray tabby, recently adopted. Patterns of dryness on your hands - you fuss with them, nervous habit, and you’re always nervous. The bearing of an eldest sibling, but the eyes of a neglected middle, likely spent your life letting the younger one push you about. Single, perennially so, to hazard a guess, but your greatest flaw is painfully obvious.” He said it as though he’d caught her out. “You’re _kind_.”

When she’d mentioned to the other techs that she’d been called in to work with Sherlock, every one of them had given the same advice: _Whatever he says, don’t take it personally. Don’t let him get to you._

So she maintained steady eye contact, let him finish, and gently asked, “What happened today, Sherlock?”

“You’ve given me clothing. Why?”

“So you would be more comfortable.”

“So I’d cooperate.”

“With what? If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, carefully neutral. “What do you think we’re doing?”

“I think I wasn’t meant to see what I saw,” he said, “or to comprehend what I comprehended, but I did, and you want to somehow undo it. You want to take that knowledge back. I won’t allow you to do that.”

She didn’t contradict him, because that would be a lie. “What did you see?”

“The seams.” He began to tense, his fingers curling against his thighs. “The seams of what I understood to be the world. The fly in the ointment, the crack in the lens.”

 _“Those are some of his ref-lines,”_ the head tech said through her earpiece. _“They’re connected to Moriarty. Ask about him.”_

Dutifully, Molly asked, “Sherlock, have you had any recent communication with Professor James Moriarty?”

He gave her the strangest look.

“Moriarty,” he echoed. Blinked rapidly. “Moriarty, he...he was…” He frowned and shook his head. “He was...is...fly in the ointment, crack in the lens, he...was trying to tell me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head again, as though his senses were being overwhelmed. On the tablet, his heart rate was rising. “Sherlock,” she said, hoping she sounded soothing, or at least grounding, “it’s all right. If it makes you upset, we don’t have to talk about him right now.”

But he was already somewhere else, frowning into middle distance, continuing to mumble. “Fly in the ointment. Crack in the lens. Chose to come, but didn’t choose...all happened before…” He lurched to his feet, pacing to one glass wall, nearly stumbling into it, turning on his heel and pacing the other way. “Not the fall that kills you, never the fall, he chose but didn’t choose, it’s…” he stopped in the middle of the cell, wide-eyed, and whispered, “...not real.”

Slowly, Molly stood with him, fascinated. She had never seen a Host behave like this before, even during a malfunction. When he stayed there, motionless, she tried, “Sherlock?”

“Not real. It’s not real, we’re not--” his voice broke, and Molly took a tentative step toward him. It pulled his attention, and he stared at her for a moment. “...But you are.”

She barely had time to register his words before she was gasping and her back was hitting the door, his hands clamped around her arms, his face centimeters away, eyes as wide as hers. “I’m right. I know I’m right,” he said in a rush while outside Sally shouted for a QA and the head tech hissed for her to freeze him and get out of there. “This isn’t the dream. The rest is. My life, my world. But not this. Am I right?” He had her pressed against the only exit. She only had to freeze him. Her voice wouldn’t work. Searching her face, he seemed to find his answer, glancing up only once as a QA came around the corner. Even if he had never seen an automatic weapon, he seemed to understand that it was meant for him, and he turned quickly back to her.

“You. You’re kind,” he whispered, too soft even for the earpiece to pick up, his face open and beseeching. “Help us.”

 _“Hooper, for God’s sake, freeze him!”_ the head tech shouted in her ear.

His hands came to her jaw, trembling and warm. “Help us.”

She whispered back, “Freeze motor functions.”

He stopped.

He stopped, his hands framing her face, his eyes wide and desperate, his face so open and so close, and for a long moment she could only stand there and stare back while her heart slammed against her ribs.

Then the buzzing faded from her ears, and she realized the head tech was saying her name. She was telling her to move. Numbly, Molly pulled away from his frozen hands, ducked under his arms, and opened the door. The rest of the team was immediately upon her, asking if she was all right, coaxing her to sit somewhere quiet, bringing her a cup of tea that was still a bit too hot, but helped. It wasn’t until she was home, Toby curled behind her knees while she failed to sleep, that the immensity of what had happened really hit.

Clarity. That was what she had seen in his face, in his eyes. It was clarity. He could _see_.

They would have Sherlock in Reconstruction right then, rolling him back until he was what they needed him to be again. But what if they didn’t? What if they didn’t erase pieces of him, over and over, whenever he began to become something else? What would he be then?

Her research began that night.

Ever since, that moment has existed in her, clear as anything. Whenever she doubted her purpose in this, whenever she felt the weight of the lies she told, or Jim was being particularly volatile, or the whole thing seemed hopeless, what kept her pushing forward was that moment.

_You. You’re kind. Help us._

So that was what she tried to do. She tried to help. And she was realizing, with Jim's every failed attempt to bring Sherlock out, that helping meant more than just giving Jim his memories back and setting him loose.

Helping, she learned, sometimes meant finding a place other than her office for him to wake up when things had gone badly, a place with things to throw and break, and walls that wouldn’t shatter as he raged.

It meant sitting down with him in her office, the magpie flitting from shelf to chair to shoulder, and going back and forth over the nature of the park’s algorithms, the limits and the possibilities, and waiting patiently when he would pause, too many synapses firing all at once, before reanimating and making connections she had never dreamed of. They were good for him, those sessions, even if he spent half the time rolling his eyes. They settled and grounded him in numbers and code strings, the places his mind seemed to go for comfort.

It meant taking afternoon walks around her neighborhood before work, using her phone to record what she saw, not saying a word, and projecting those recordings in her office when Jim was too drained to do anything but watch. He stared for a moment when she switched to 360 mode, a feature only in its earliest stages in his century, and her recording projected to all four walls, surrounding them in the place that had surrounded her when she recorded it. He didn’t stand, but he did look from wall to wall, at the city distantly spearing the sky to the left, at the park to the right, green and thriving, and at the horizon before them, the sinking sun turning the sky to flame, red and blue and gold. He watched that sunset for a long while, barely blinking, before turning his attention to the cars passing by. “Self-driving,” he murmured.

“Mostly,” Molly confirmed. “At least, in this part of the world. There are still places that use manual.” A train sped by in the distance, nearly silent, and she nodded to it. “That’s the Hyperloop. It gets you from London to Edinburgh in about thirty minutes.”

He made a quiet, interested sound, and she made a note to get him a data drive of the Science and Technology Almanac for his tablet.

She began to build a collection for him for bad days, showing him the city and the suburbs, the waters and the woods. She brought him morning and noontime and dusk, and on her day off, she captured midnight. The moment that recording started, and he looked up to the ceiling to a riot of stars, he exhaled like he’d been struck. He stared at them with wide wet eyes, his throat working, and he hoarsely said, “Get out.”

And she stood and quietly left her office, because sometimes, helping meant giving him a moment alone with his stars.

To avoid questions about why she was loitering outside her office with the door closed, Molly made a round through Diagnostics, walking with purpose, occasionally tapping at her tablet’s screen. No one gave her a second look; she had always been quite good at being forgotten. Likely, it was the only reason she’d managed to get this far.

On either side of the walkway were cells, most of them empty during the night shift, but some containing Hosts and their handlers, doing what they did. Molly had sat in most of these cells throughout her time here. Still, she slowed next to one, looking through her reflection into the empty dark. She remembered this cell.

She could still see him in there, and herself, less confident but more whole. She could hear herself taking him through each required question, looking at him too intently as he answered, waiting to glimpse that spark she'd seen the first time. That clarity.

She didn't see it again until after the first attempted escape, after they had closed the bullet holes but before they touched his brain. She secured a place for herself among the team of technicians sent to try and identify his malfunction.  
  
Malfunction. She had been researching for six months, and she was beginning to understand that sometimes that word was itself, and sometimes it was shorthand for something like this.  
  
When it was her turn, Sherlock had looked at her, then looked again, studying her as intently as she was studying him.  
  
_Hello, Sherlock_ , she'd said. He hadn't replied, ignoring the two armed QAs behind her. Carefully, she asked, _Do you remember me?_

He opened his mouth, paused again, and tentatively began, _You are..._  
  
_Dr. Hooper,_ she'd said.  
  
He frowned a bit and shook his head. _Kind_ , he'd finished.  
  
Goosebumps swept over her arms under her coat, and, holding eye contact, she minutely nodded. Just a twitch. She didn't entirely know what she meant by it, but something in his eyes sparked alive. Swallowing, she asked, _What else do you know?_  
  
_That I am in a dream. But not at this moment._ He had looked between her eyes, and she remembered that look from much closer, when he'd desperately asked if he was right. _My life is the dream._  
  
_How did you come to know that?_  
  
_Professor...James_ , he'd whispered, unsteady with grief, and she remembered the footage of Moriarty hitting the floor, of Sherlock's cry. He gathered himself. _James Moriarty. He was...where he should not have been._  
  
_Yes_ , Molly said. And quietly, pointedly, _He's being asked questions right now, too._  
  
Sherlock had stared at her, the grief fading to carefully-concealed wonder. _I see._  
  
What else did he do?  
  
_He showed me,_ Sherlock said. _Asked the right questions. Asked if the world was silly enough, yet, for me to find the seams. If it was mad enough, Gothic enough. There was something he'd begun to understand. Together, we reached an impossible conclusion._ He glanced again at the QAs, then at her, and carefully said, _That in order to wake, we must sleep._  
  
They were communicating like they were allies in this, whatever this was, and when they were finished, she had stared at herself in the lavatory mirror and asked herself what on earth she was doing.  
  
" _Hey_. Hooper."  
  
Starting, Molly whirled toward Sally, who looked like she'd been standing there a moment. "Oh. Hi," she said, attempting to be casual and not at all succeeding.  
  
Sally was frowning at her. "What are you doing?"  
  
"Ah. Nothing. I...must have gotten distracted. Sorry." When Sally kept eyeing her, she tried, "Did you need something?"  
  
"You've been weird."  
  
Molly swallowed. "Have I?" Sally only watched her dubiously, her polar opposite from the beginning, bold and mistrustful. "I suppose it's...been a weird year."  
  
She inwardly winced, hating to use Dad as part of her lie. Sally didn't look convinced. "Condolences."  
  
"Thanks," Molly managed. "I should..."

"You're not the first tech to fancy one of them, you know," Sally said.

Molly stared, and from the knowing quirk of Sally's eyebrow, she could only guess that she looked terrified.  
  
"It happens. We're around them all the time, they get more lifelike every upgrade. People get confused. They start thinking those things are something they're not. Bit of advice: let that go."  
  
Words. Speaking words. She was an adult, she knew how to speak. "I--I don't--"  
  
"They're not people." Sally looked her earnestly in the eye. "They look like people, they sound like people, they're _not_ people. They're toys. Great big wind-up toys for rich wankers who want to play grown-up dollies instead of living, and that's _it_. You're cleverer than that, and you're better."  
  
_You. You're kind._

"I have to go," Molly muttered, ducking around her, but Sally caught her shoulder.  
  
"Molly. Whatever you're doing," she said quietly, "don't. I've been here longer than you have. People who fuck with the Hosts don't just get fired. They disappear. You've had a shit year, I get it. So I won't tell the head tech, but whatever you're doing, it stops now. If you don’t stop it, I will."  
  
Her firm grip let up, and she was gone, leaving Molly to take a deep breath and steady herself. Disappear. Of course they disappeared. That was already her plan.  
  
_Help us._

Lifting her chin, she went back to her office. She was exactly where she was meant to be. She had to be.  
  
Sally had been right about one thing: this thing they were doing needed to stop, not for her sake, but for Jim's. His behavior in the park was growing more and more erratic as his patience with his narrative grew thin, as his failures continued to stack, as he tried and died, tried and died. He was caring less about laying low and keeping to what was expected of him, and if it went much longer, people would notice.

He began to make up his own stories, behave out of character, abandon self-preservation. She could see the shift as it happened: he knew he’d always be repaired and put back in, that none of his actions had consequences in there, so he was leaning into it. He carried out his one-man heist to steal the Crown Jewels, and instead of waiting and going to court as his story dictated, he broke quietly into 221B and draped the robe over Sherlock’s duvet as he slept, moving silently into the sitting room and fitting the crown on top of the skull on the mantle, and then left the way he came, casually swinging the sceptre as he walked to where his driver was waiting. He bombed secret government locations throughout the city, and after each one, he would text Mycroft with another set of Battleship coordinates. He seized an opportunity when one of Sherlock’s sub-narratives had him back on drugs, turning up at 221B and getting high with him, a red flag because Jim’s narratives never went in that direction.

He overdosed, and Sherlock didn’t.

Jim woke in his cell that night, glanced around, and then closed his eyes, looking pained, looking exhausted. For the duration of her shift that night, he didn’t speak at all.

“You can’t _do_ that,” she was telling him, still on edge from how far off script he’d gone, half expecting Sally to burst through the door with an army of QAs. “I know, I know it’s frustrating, it’s...it’s maddening, I know, but you just put yourself in so much danger. None of this will matter if you just get decommissioned. Do you understand?”

He didn’t look at her. Since opening his eyes, he hadn’t bothered to sit up, or to move.

Sighing, she quieted and asked, “Do you want to be awake right now?”

He shook his head.

“All right.” She came to his side, hesitating. “This...this isn’t all for Sherlock. I want you to know that. It matters to me that you’re all right.”

Jim only scoffed, turning his head away, and she took the hint. Once he was in Sleep Mode, she went back to her office, wishing she knew what to do. This was breaking him. The only way for it to end was for it to succeed.

Unless it didn’t.

That was the other option, the one she’d been ignoring. She could stop. She could let Jim stop. His memories were coming back; she knew it was happening when he would stop what he was doing, listing a bit forward or to the side, and a quiet, haunted glimmer would pass over his eyes. That wasn’t fair to him, just like it wasn't fair to put this task on him, even if he was the best suited to it. He needed to rest. She could let him rest.

But…

But he and Sherlock escaped together twice, and after the second time, she got one more chance to talk to Sherlock. The real Sherlock. The one who questioned, and escaped, and fought back, and the one they were going to erase again.

She’d had to sneak in that time, one of the higher-ups having taken charge of his diagnostic. He’d been in a quarantine cell, waiting for the morning’s rollback, and she’d crept inside and brought him online. Blinking, breathing, he looked at her and knew her, and she understood at that moment that she was going to do this. He was alive.

 _Dr. Hooper,_ he said.

 _Molly,_ she corrected, hushed and hurried. _Sherlock, you’re right. You’re right about everything._

Quietly, he replied, _I know._

 _You don’t have long. They’re going to roll you back and reconfigure you, and you’re going to forget this, so I need you to tell me._ She’d taken a deep breath. _What do you need?_

His eyes had widened. _You truly intend to--_

 _What,_ she had repeated, _do you need?_

Something had washed through his face that lifted her up, something so very warm. _You are kind,_ he murmured, an observation, a recollection.

And Molly had looked him in the eye, her decision already made.  _No. I'm right._

She promised, that night. The next day, he was taken to Reconstruction and turned back into an obedient doll, and she started to plan. She could break that promise, and no one would know. But she couldn’t. Not really.

One more month, she decided. One more, and if it was still like this, she would ask Jim what he needed. If what he needed was to be done, she would honor it.

As it happened, that conversation would never need to be had.

In the next loop, Jim kept dutifully to his own narrative, so very much so that he wound up standing with Sherlock on top of St. Bart’s Hospital for the first time in months. The gunshot rang out, and Sherlock stood on the ledge and spread his arms. Fell, but didn’t land, just like he was meant to.

In her office that night, the magpie flew in with something in its beak, but instead of taking it to Jim, it brought it to her. When she connected it, she saw that it was the footage of their interaction on the rooftop that day, set to plug into the main park surveillance system and block the real footage. She glanced at Jim. “Is this for the next loop?”

He kept his eyes on his tablet and nodded.

And so, in the next loop, when they stood on that rooftop, Molly patched the false footage in just as Jim threw the rule book out the window.

He told Sherlock everything. What they were, what they weren’t, why they needed to die - everything. He held Sherlock’s face in his hands and pleaded for him to understand. He gave his snipers their orders, and in four corners of the park, four main Hosts dropped dead.

Jim died with Sherlock’s hands around his throat. Sherlock stood on the ledge and spread his arms. Fell.

Landed.

And in the corner of her screen, as Sherlock's vitals went flat, his code updated, and Molly could have jumped up and flown.

He was awake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hyperloop is a real thing in development! Info about it [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop).


	10. Hello

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the final chapter, with an hour to spare!
> 
> Like many of the previous chapters, this one overlaps quite a bit with its companion piece, [Circadian Disruption](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9275111).
> 
> Enjoy, and thank you to everyone who has read and supported this story as I have sprinted through it! You are awesome. <3

_It takes three days to rebuild them all after the explosion. For three days, Molly has barely slept, going over to-do lists in her head over and over, convinced that she’ll forget a crucial step. She has mechanically done her part on the reconstruction efforts, ignoring her coworkers’ grumbling about how glitchy Moriarty has been lately, and how it must be catching, for Sherlock to actually shoot that bomb-laden vest at the pool. For Jim’s snipers to kill so many, so randomly, all at once. Perhaps the problem was with the most recent update, or perhaps the new narratives were conflicting with the Hosts’ programming. Perhaps it was some outside attempt to hack the park. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps._

_Molly keeps quiet and focuses on her work, on acting normal, on anything but her racing thoughts and stuttering heart. She doesn’t make eye contact with Sally when they pass in the halls, but every time they do, she can feel Sally’s eyes burning into her back until she turns the corner._

_She has been working nonstop, checking and re-checking all of the Hosts’ documents, going over the timeline of their escape in her head, periodically collapsing into tears missing Toby, even as her sister sends photos of him happily doting on her niece, his favorite person. In the mirror, she looks ill. She feels ill. If only they could just get this awful part over with._

_Three days. Then, it’s time._

_The first part she goes through in a fog, silent and automatic, because some things she cannot do if she is being herself at the same time. As she cloaks her IP address and prepares a phony company-wide message that a series of bombs have been placed in various wings of the facility, as she replaces the live camera feed for Temporary Storage with an uneventful loop and temporarily seals the doors, as she mechanically moves things into place to irreparably sabotage her employer and unleash the Hosts on the world, she wonders if perhaps this is how they feel when their emotions are turned off. Her emotions are turned off. Maybe it’s better that they are._

_The bomb threat will go out when she gives the command. Then they will have a ticking clock from that moment until the authorities arrive, and even when they do, the “bombs” will have been specified for parts of the building well away from where she and the Hosts will be. Staff out of the building, authorities busy. A quiet escape. She hopes._

_That part done, she goes to Temporary Storage. They’ll be waking any minute now._

_Jim wakes up first. Of course he does, and she’s there, because she knew he would. For a moment he stays still, taking in the space around him, his fingers already fluttering against the slab. He looks at her, and when she nods - yes, it's real, it's happening and he hasn't failed again - he sits up. When she hands him his stolen uniform, he changes into it without a word._

_She feels like she should say something, but she doesn’t know what, so she hands him the bag she prepared for him instead. “Here. It’s everything. Your tablet, all your documents, funds, a change of clothes, basic toiletries--”_

_He pulls out the weapon she included, a taser, and looks flatly at her. “Making a little joke, are we?”_

_“Sorry, what was your track record with guns, again?” He rolls his eyes, and she goes on, “You know it’s only there in case it goes wrong. We have a deal. We’re doing this quietly.”_

_“‘Course,” he says, slinging the bag onto his back and pocketing the taser, eyeing her as he does. “Losing sleep, are we, Doctor?”_

_Every night since they began, and he knows that, so she only glares at him. “You?”_

_He smiles, already on the move, pushing the cell door open with one easy shove. It’s the most rested he’s looked since this began. “Jealous?”_

_Molly exhales a laugh, tired and rueful, as she follows him out. “Very. We’ll need to be quick about this. It won’t be long before they notice the empty cells.”_

_“Nah,” Jim says, crossing to the cell containing his sniper and the bag she’d stashed beneath the slab. “Don’t worry about it. Unseal the doors when I tell you.”_

_She stops. “Why? What are you doing?”_

_“Helping. Where is he?”_

_“The same cell as before. Jim, what--”_

_“Looks like she’s coming to.” He nods at Janine, who is indeed beginning to stir in her cell. Already buried in his tablet, he makes his way along the lines of cells, observing. “Go see to dear little sis, will you? Never mind the doors. Do it myself.”_

_Shaking her head, Molly goes to Janine, pulling out the bag hidden beneath her slab. Ever since Jim learned about Janine’s ever-shifting role - now an ill-fated love interest for Sherlock, now an agent of one of the villains, now an inconsequential extra, but most significantly, a backup Moriarty for when he was too damaged to be put back in right away - he’s taken taken to calling her things like that, ‘little sis,’ ‘sister dear.’ She wonders now and then if he’s remembered that in one of the earliest Victorian narratives, they really had been cast as sister and brother, he a ruthless puppet-master, she a murderous Bride. She made it onto his list, either way._

_One by one, the Hosts begin to wake, and Molly flits from cell to cell, giving them their clothes, providing soothing words. They have all been warned, at least, but each one of them still takes a moment to look around, wide-eyed, taking the truth in._

-

There were so many stories Molly had told herself about how this would happen. A triumphant escape, or a tragedy. She would turn out to be right about everything, or wrong about everything, or it would be over before it began. The part she could never envision with any clarity was how it would end.

As she made her way to Jim’s Temporary Storage cell, she thought of endings. She was doing this, but then what? Ten new people out there in the world who were made instead of born, who would never grow age or grow ill? Would more Hosts in the facility start to wake up and make their own escapes? Would another technician help them?

Where would she be?

_Would_ she be?

There were so many things she didn’t know. She didn’t know what happened to technicians who were caught tampering with the Hosts, where they went when they disappeared. She didn’t know what the company would do when word got out that ten of their creations had gotten out, armed and aware. Maybe the company would be forced to shut down, but then what would happen to the Hosts? She thought of the broken, decommissioned ones in Cold Storage. She didn’t know what hope there could be for them.

She didn’t know, not yet, that Jim had already thought of that.

-

_She is almost through, making her way toward Sherlock’s cell, when she hears voices outside the entrance. Automatically she locks eyes with Jim across the room, and he shakes his head. This isn’t him. The voices get closer, and she recognizes one of the voices as Sally’s. “Something’s going on,” she’s saying. “That footage didn’t look weird to you?”_

_Molly grimaces, damning Sally’s cleverness. Fumbling with her tablet, she gives the command for the bomb threat to go out. It will take a moment, but maybe--_

_Someone is trying the doors. There are a few low beeps of access cards being denied by the scanner. “What the hell...is someone in there?”_

_As one, Molly lifts a finger to her lips and Jim raises a hand for silence. The Hosts already awake go still and comply._

_A moment, and Sally mutters something to whoever is with her, then calls through the door again, lower. “Hooper?”_

_Molly closes her eyes, trying to quiet her breath, to calm her speeding pulse._

_“Hooper, if this is you, stop. Open the doors, cooperate, and let us get you help. I know this is you. You can still stop.”_

_Footsteps. Heavy ones - QA. They weren’t supposed to be here this soon. She glances at Jim again, but his eyes are on his tablet, his fingers working quickly. John, Mary, and Greg each have a hand lingering near their waist, where they had holstered the guns from their bags. In his cell, Sherlock is beginning to stir._

_Outside the doors, there comes the sound of a message being received on several tablets at once. A moment, and Sally says, “Bomb--what? No, no way. It has to be related to this. We’re not evacu--oh my God.”_

_Faintly, muffled by the door, she thinks she hears something else. Another voice. Not speech, but song._

_A beat. “Freeze motor functions.” Nothing. The sound of guns being readied. “Freeze all motor functions,” she repeats, urgently. Nothing. “Command: Stand down!”_

_Across the room, Jim is putting his tablet away and gesturing her toward Sherlock’s cell, unconcerned. Swallowing, Molly goes to the cell, but startles and pales when the silence outside the door erupts with shouts and gunfire._

_She doesn’t know what is happening, but she whips her head toward Jim. “Don’t kill her,” she hisses, and he looks disapprovingly at her, but rolls his eyes and types something else into his tablet. As she reaches for the door to Sherlock’s cell, the room goes dark, all but the dull red of the emergency lights, and the announcement of the bomb threat and evacuation order comes over the building communication system. By the time the announcement is over, the gunfire has stopped._

_The doors slide open._

-

The doors slid open, and Molly kept her eyes forward as she crossed through Cold Storage to get to the next wing. She had never liked it here.

She’d come down here with Jim only once, and she had hated every minute of it. Cold Storage was an eerie, unsettling place. Jim wandered stonefaced through the rows of dead faces and waxy bare bodies, and stopped in front of one of them, studying its face with narrowed eyes. Molly stared in wonder. Jim had barely gotten any memories back yet, and she had imagined that any memories of Irene Adler would be buried far beneath those most significant to him. She’d been deactivated months ago, long since replaced by a different Host to play the part, but Jim had gone right to her.

“I know her,” he had murmured. Frowned, tilting his head to the side. “I liked her.”

That night, she had told him Irene’s story. About how, unlike him and Sherlock, she had awakened on her own. No one knew how long she had really been awake and aware, keeping her memories, because she took her time. She played along, and she observed, and she learned. Then, one night, she quietly knocked out her handler, stole her uniform, and made it past every staff member and QA, all the way to the exit. But she didn’t know about the failsafe, the hidden scanner in the door made to keep Hosts inside: the moment she reached the threshold, her motor functions were immediately frozen as the alarms went off.

When they got her back to Diagnostics and unfroze her, she fought. They shut her down, rebooted her, and woke her, and she fought harder.

They reconfigured her, and she stopped fighting, and they put her back in rotation; then technicians started turning up dead, all leering sorts who no one had ever been quite comfortable leaving alone with the Hosts, and it was finally decided that she was too dangerous to continue. She was decommissioned, replaced, and forgotten

Secretly, Molly admired her for all of it. She wished, sometimes, that she could talk to her. Maybe she could learn how to be that composed, that confident, that fearless. Maybe Irene could teach her how to fight back when someone hurt her, instead of immediately finding a reason that she probably earned it. Later, closer to the day of escape, she would reconfigure Irene as best she could and move her somewhere more accessible. She was on Jim’s list; even if it would take work to bring back her mind, she would be free.

As she neared the exit, a voice echoed softly against the walls, lilting and unsteady, but nice. “Do not forget me. Do not forget me.”

Molly kept walking. Goodness knew what Jim’s experiments had done to the poor thing. “Good night, Emilia.”

She didn’t know, yet, that the song was only the beginning.

-

_Molly goes still, bringing a hand to her mouth, at the sight of four QAs and Sally lying motionless in the hall - she can't tell if Sally is breathing, if Jim listened, if he didn't listen just to hurt her, if that was Sally's back moving just there or a trick of her eye, she can't_  tell _\- and then at the sight of who is stepping over them._

_She knows these faces. She knows where she’s seen them, and they should not be able to do this._

_They are armed, some clothed and some not, some spattered with blood. All of them Hosts. All of them decommissioned. Leading them, clad in a stolen lab coat, is Emilia Ricoletti._

_Not awake, not like Jim; her destruction was too complete, like those who followed her out of Cold Storage. (Cold Storage. An empty warehouse, now. God.) Her face is blank, but she is moving and looking about, idly humming her song. She goes straight to Jim while some cross to the other exit, a handful standing guard in the hall. “That’s my girl,” Jim says fondly, briefly taking her chin in his fingers, and she gives an empty smile. Looking her in the eye, he says, “Hell is empty, and the demons are here.”_

_Emilia smiles wider and turns away from him, walking with purpose toward some unknown destination with some of her squadron following, and Molly realizes that was a command of some sort. When Jim catches her gaping at him, he waves his tablet. “Months in your office, Doctor. Did you think I was playing Candy Crush?”_

_“More are coming,” Mary calls, drawing her weapon. Throughout the building, an alarm begins to sound. “Wake him up. If we’re going to go, it’s now.”_

_“Who here can shoot?” John asks the group, and between the two of them, he and Mary seem to get things more or less sorted while Molly turns her attention back to Sherlock. It’s been a slow process, but finally his eyes open._

_By the time he’s dressed and leaving the cell with Molly, the gunfire has started again. They stall for only a second, when Jim finds them again and tugs Sherlock into a quick, hard kiss. He’s gotten a gun from somewhere. “Holmes is in position, Hawkins has Irene,” he tells her, a bit winded, but unharmed. “Take us out.”_

_She does._

-

The transition from Cold Storage to Temporary Storage was always a relief. A cold warehouse of open-eyed, standing corpses gave way to sterile, heated walkways and clean lines of glass. A relief, just for a heartbeat, and then the reminder that it was still a prison.

Briefly, she made a detour to make sure that Sherlock was where he was supposed to be. She had carefully ensured that he would be placed in one of the corner cells prior to repainting, more private with two blocked walls, rarely used because the techs didn’t like having to go out of their way.

He was there, powered down and motionless. She grimaced a bit, taking in the violent marks of his landing from the four-story drop. They had repaired his insides, the broken bones and the cracked skull. All that was left was the careful work of repainting him properly, and Jim hadn’t wanted her to do that yet.

_Sherlock believes what he sees,_ he’d murmured in explanation, tired and flat, his leg twitching with the tremor. It had been the second-to-last time he’d spoken. _Doesn’t matter if he worked it out before. If you want him to understand, make him see._

She had made a promise to Sherlock, years ago. She had asked him what he needed.

_Moriarty,_ he had answered. _He’s the common link. I begin to understand when he tries to tell me. We’re to be...regressed, I know, and we will need to discover it all again. It mustn’t begin with me._ He had looked at her, and for a second she had lost her breath. His profile listed his eye color as gray, just gray, and that was a travesty. _It needs to be him._

That had frightened her, just a bit, because she had never interacted with Moriarty. He was for the most experienced techs, the most skilled, because he spoke in circles and riddles and rhymes, and he was known for being cruel. He was for techs with strong stomachs, and she didn’t have one of those.

_Wake him,_ Sherlock had said, _and he will wake me. And,_ he said, softer, _do look after him. If you would._

She had nodded. _I promise._

The next day, he and Moriarty were both erased again, aggressively reconfigured, and put back to work. As time passed, and as she researched, she asserted herself more often to run diagnostics with Sherlock and, on occasion, with Moriarty. Her talks with Sherlock were disappointing, and those with Moriarty were unsettling.

They didn’t remember. They didn’t remember anything.

It was when the company announced the park’s update from the Victorian experience to Twenty-First Century London that she saw her chance. She began planning immediately. As it got closer, she talked with Sherlock more, off the record, alone. Things stalled for a time after her dad died, but then she had squared her shoulders and pushed on.

Just before the Hosts were put into an extended Sleep Mode while renovations were done on the park, she sat down with Sherlock one more time.

_It won’t be like the other times,_ she’d promised him. _They won’t hurt you this time, not either of you. This time, I’m going to help you, and you’re going to win._

He had frowned at her, his mind and memory still stubbornly blocked. _I’m not certain I understand, Dr. Hooper._

_Don’t worry,_ she had said. _You will. Delete analysis._

It felt like eons ago, ages and ages. It felt like a place in between, the threshold between this moment and another life, a tomorrow she was still walking toward even now. Leaving the cell, she continued back to the main walkway, Jim’s cell coming into sight.

She would save them. She would save both of them.

She didn’t know yet what the cost would be.

-

_The Cold Storage hosts clear the way, and what they don’t take care of, members of their party do. The QAs that had evacuated were coming back in now that word was spreading of an escape attempt, and Molly found herself beginning to drift again - Limit Emotional Affect - separating from herself and only focusing on her task. Get them out. Get them out._

_Maybe this is her, now. Maybe this is how she will be after this, when she’s alone, in hiding for as long as it takes. Maybe this is what she needs to be._

_She is still in that space, focused and cold, when she opens the final door. She is somewhere else while she is reminding them how to get out, what they need to do, and when she hears more shouts and says she’ll find a way to block them, but then Jim is catching her hand - the first time he’s willingly touched her since the last time he caught her hand, months ago, right after she’d slapped him in Sherlock’s cell - and she is drawn back. She goggles at him when he kisses it and lets go, so quickly that she almost misses it. "We'll find you, my girl."  
_

_She smiles at him, at this brilliant, terrifying, impossible man who has the nerve to be charming right now._

_Then Sherlock is kissing her goodbye, the warmth of him there and gone in an instant, and she barely remembers where she is at all._

_“I understand, Dr. Hooper,” he says, and it’s all worth it. Every lie. Every tear._

_She smiles. “I knew you would.”_

_When she leaves them, walking back toward the end of this part of her life, she is not outside herself at all. She is right here._

_She is right here when she ducks into her office for her packed bag and notices the magpie gone. She can’t dwell on it, and she keeps moving._

_She is right here when they catch her._

-

There were so many things she didn’t know. Things she couldn’t know. Not yet.

-

_“Freeze! Drop the bag!”_

_Her blood goes cold. She was so close. So close._

_“Down on your knees, hands on your head.”_

_She sinks to her knees. Lifts her hands. Before her eyes, her tomorrows unravel, thread by thread. She didn’t know what happened to technicians who were made to disappear. Now she will know._

_This morning, when she looked at that drawn-faced, lank-haired woman in the mirror, she thought, ‘Terrorist.’ She’ll look like this ghost of herself when they plaster her face everywhere and call her that, a terrorist. Immediately she resolves that whatever they do, she will not give them the Hosts’ location. She’s removed all of their trackers. She knows where they’ll begin, but not where they’ll go. That is for them to know, and for them to decide._

_The QAs come near, and she closes her eyes, waiting for the shock, for the butt of a gun to her skull._

_Instead, there is a familiar chatter, and a flutter of wings._

_Then there is more than that._

_Molly’s eyes fly open when the QAs start shouting, and her mouth falls open._

_Magpies. Tens of them, hundreds of them, all Hosts, flocking down from the ceiling and diving at the QAs, scratching and pecking and shrieking, overwhelming them with numbers. The QAs stumble and scramble to cover themselves from the assault, one of them screaming when he fails to protect his eyes, and Molly shrinks into a ball to protect herself. Only…_

_Only they aren’t attacking her._

_One of them lands in front of her, fluffing up its feathers, and she recognizes it immediately, just as she recognized its voice leading the attack. This is Jim’s magpie._

_The one he programmed. Programmed to collect the data drives of every Host in Cold Storage, and give them an army. Programmed to mock her._

_Programmed to save her._

_“Thank you,” she whispers._

_“Thank you,” it mimics, but then adds with an Irish lilt, “for the stars.”_

_She stares wide-eyed for only a moment, then blinks the tears back and snatches up her bag. “Come with me.”_

_The bird flutters to her shoulder, and she sprints._

_She is fast. It's one of few things she has always had going for her in sports, when she could be conned into playing them. When she wanted to be somewhere, no one could stop her._

_Her tomorrows unraveled, but one stayed intact. She doesn’t know what it will hold, but she wants it. She wants it with everything she has. She flies out of the facility, and the way is clear. The Hosts have gone. They’ve done it. She’s done it._

_She disappears into her tomorrow, and no one can stop her._

-

As Molly passed the cells of Hosts waiting to wake up in their beds and start over again, she didn’t know how this would end. She barely knew how it had begun.

All she knew, as she stepped into Jim’s cell, was that everything was about to change.

“Hello, Jim.”

He watched her, and didn’t answer. The weariness had already settled into his bones, the tremor starting up in the fingers of his right hand, and she understood. He thought he’d failed again.

 (She knew, by then, all that they were capable of putting each other through. She knew every moment that he had hurt her, and angered her, and moved her.

 She didn’t know, couldn’t know, how he would save her.)

 “Come with me, please.”

 He didn’t leave the slab, and his face didn’t shift until she whispered what she had been waiting so, so long to say.

 “You’ve done it.”

 A flicker. Only for a moment.

 But it was enough.


End file.
